"If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of -borrowed money, and imagine what they'd fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people inside the firms were essentially worth nothing...

'The thing we couldn't figure out is: It's so obvious. Why hasn't everyone else figured out that the machine is done?... They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.' "

-- Michael Lewis