For most of Wall Street’s history, stock trading was fairly straightforward: buyers and sellers gathered on exchange floors and dickered until they struck a deal. – Charles Duhigg
You have to actually believe in your capacity to change for habits to permanently change. – Charles Duhigg
Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months. – Charles Duhigg
When people have a willpower failure, it’s because they haven’t anticipated a situation that’s going to come along. – Charles Duhigg
Charles Wyly was born Oct 13, 1933, in Lake Providence, La., and for a period lived with his family in a shack without electricity or plumbing. – Charles Duhigg
In a sense, habits never really disappear. Once formed, they always remain in our neurology. – Charles Duhigg
As the nation’s elderly population grows, dozens of industries have tried to harness the political might of older Americans for corporate goals. – Charles Duhigg
Lawsuits against reverse mortgage companies, including the nation’s largest, Financial Freedom Senior Funding, contend that those firms helped pressure older Americans into bad investments. – Charles Duhigg
If you need five minutes every hour to look at tweets or to just surf the Internet, you need to schedule that into your schedule, allow yourself to do that. Because when people start procrastinating, what they’ve done is, they’ve tried to ignore that urge. They try to deny themselves time on Facebook or time surfing the web. – Charles Duhigg
It’s an open secret that if a debtor is willing to wait long enough, he can probably get away with paying almost nothing, as long as he doesn’t mind hurting his credit score. – Charles Duhigg
During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health. – Charles Duhigg
Most people probably don’t even know what toothpaste they buy; they just recognize the box on the shelf. – Charles Duhigg
Equipment sellers can pocket more than $2,500 every time they send a powered wheelchair to a patient and bill Medicare. – Charles Duhigg
Calling out people for not voting, what experts term ‘public shaming,’ can prod someone to cast a ballot. – Charles Duhigg
The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. – Charles Duhigg
Some of the tactics that are used by Foxconn and other companies throughout China is, if you are late, if you violate one of the small rules, some of the punishment is that you have to copy down quotations from the chairman of Foxconn: you have to write out confessions explaining why you were late and promising never to do it again. – Charles Duhigg
Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss. – Charles Duhigg
Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system. – Charles Duhigg
Way back in 2000, the EPA was poised, and, in fact, had drafted a rule, to specially regulate pollution – water pollution and other types of pollution – from power plants, but the energy industry pushed back pretty significantly. – Charles Duhigg
For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures. – Charles Duhigg
At some point, if you’re changing a really deep-seated behavior, you’re going to have a moment of weakness. – Charles Duhigg
There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell. – Charles Duhigg
Fraudulent and improper payments have long bedeviled Medicare, a $466 billion program. In particular, payments for durable medical equipment, like power wheelchairs and diabetic test kits, are ripe for fraud. – Charles Duhigg
Foxconn is hugely important, not only in China – it’s the largest employer in China – Foxconn is important around the world. – Charles Duhigg
The discovery of the habit loop is important because it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. – Charles Duhigg
You can’t suddenly say, ‘I want a brand new habit tomorrow,’ and expect it to be easy and effortless. – Charles Duhigg
Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened. – Charles Duhigg
Analysts say that one reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were privatized in the first place was to prevent political whims from dominating the mortgage marketplace. – Charles Duhigg
