A Quote by John Lanchester

You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy. — © John Lanchester
You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.
The way the housing market imploded is obviously not an easy thing to explain. It's a little bit easier in a book - people can take their time, you can sort of go back and reread - but in a movie you've got two hours to not only explain things like collateralized debt obligations, but you also have to make it entertaining.
The collateralized debt obligation, the CDO, is a structure which allows you to more or less continuously choose how much risk you want to take in a whole batch of securities. And the reason why they got us into so much trouble is that it's hard to figure out how much risk you really are taking.
There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves us to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started.
You've seen certain credit type products that are going to be in nonbanks, like sophisticated CLO [collateralized loan obligation] tranches and stuff where the capital charge is so high that a bank simply will not own it. Someone will buy it, hedge it, trade it. But it won't typically be a bank.
Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It's a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can't get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy.
Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy.
[Banks] have a clear obligation to help get this country off its addiction to debt because they sure as hell helped to get this country addicted to debt.
I do not like debt and do not like to invest in companies that have too much debt, particularly long-term debt. With long-term debt, increases in interest rates can drastically affect company profits and make future cash flows less predictable.
Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.
I fully believe that the U.S. has the obligation to honor its debt.
It is often too easy to explain a novel idea to a few enlightened persons with a few words. But to enlighten about the same to many people, too many words are often required
A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.
When you default on a secured debt, the creditor takes the asset that backs up that debt. When you convert credit card debt to mortgage debt, you are securing that credit card debt with your home. That's a risky proposition.
The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.
In general, I think every novel is a political novel, in that every novel is an argument about how the world works, who has power, who has a voice, what we should care about. But political novels can be boringly polemical if they end up being too black and white, too one dimensional, like war is bad, killing people is wrong.
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