The office of the presidency has these god-like powers especially with regards to our foreign affairs,” Lewis says. “The president can be so powerful in some ways and in other ways, particularly with regard to domestic affairs, he’s hamstrung, so this weird disjuncture between his powers and his powerlessness is really striking.

— Michael Lewis Studies ‘Obama’s Way’

“What I noticed is that that office takes your personality and exaggerates it — you become a caricature of who you are. And he has a personality trait that costs him politically, and it’s the personality trait of a writer. He really is at bottom a writer, and the trait is — he’s in a moment and not in a moment at the same time. He can be in a room but detach himself at the same time. It’s almost as if he’s writing about it at the same time he’s participating in it. It’s a curious inside-outside thing, and the charge that he’s aloof grows right out of this trait.

— Michael Lewis on Obama, the person

So [Goldman Sachs] lent the government money without saying that’s what they were doing. If you did this in the corporate world, a bunch of people would be put in jail. They helped the Greek government rig its books so that they looked acceptable to the European Union so they’d be admitted to the euro [zone].

— Michael Lewis on Goldman Sachs doing off-market currency trades with the government of Greece.

You look at the financial crisis in Europe and the fingerprints of American investment bankers are everywhere. The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior.

— Michael Lewis on the financial crisis in Europe.

Once the Bush and Obama administrations decided that you couldn’t let these firms fail and they didn’t want the mess of nationalizing them, there was really only one way forward — and that way was to gift money onto these banks until they’re back on their feet and can function at the center of the economy again. But that, to any normal person who is outside the system, just looks ridiculously unfair. It looks like socialism for capitalists and capitalism for everybody else. So it’s no wonder people are marching in southern Manhattan.

— On today’s Fresh Air, Michael Lewis talks about Occupy Wall Street, the debt crisis in Greece, the Euro, and why he feels like California is having ‘third world problems’