Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street

By Michael Lewis

Book Overview

In this shrewd and wickedly funny book, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake's progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick, the most dangerous beast in the jungle, a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars' worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.With the eye and ear of a born storyteller, Michael Lewis shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. In the Salomon training program a roomful of aspirants is stunned speechless by the vitriolic profanity of the Human Piranha; out on the trading floor, bond traders throw telephones at the heads of underlings and Salomon chairman Gutfreund challenges his chief trader to a hand of liar's poker for one million dollars; around the world in London, Tokyo, and New York, bright young men like Michael Lewis, connected by telephones and computer terminals, swap gross jokes and find retail buyers for the staggering debt of individual companies or whole countries.The bond traders, wearing greed and ambition and badges of honor, might well have swaggered straight from the pages of Bonfire of the Vanities. But for all their outrageous behavior, they were in fact presiding over enormous changes in the world economy. Lewis's job, simply described, was to transfer money, in the form of bonds, from those outside America who saved to those inside America who consumed. In doing so, he generated tens of millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers, and earned for himself a ringside seat on the greatest financial spectacle of the decade: the leveraging of America.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393027503
• ISBN13: 9780393027501
• Release Date: October 1989
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

For all aspiring Investment Bankers!

Almost everyone who is graduating is tempted by the glamour and large bonuses of Investment Banks to wonder what it would be like to work in a large investment bank on Wall Street and actually consider it as a serious career option. LIAR'S POKER provides an irreverent, bird's eye view of the whole process. This is an extraordinarily funny but thought provoking account of a money focussed guy's innings at a venerable Investment bank Salomon Brothers, starting as a $48,000-a-year trainee in 1984 to go on to become an institutional bond salesman in Salomon's London office earning $225,000 in 1987. Far from just being entertaining the book gives lots of insight into the intense cutthroat investment banking industry and makes it accessible for even the naivest of readers the intricacies of the milieu. An insider's look at the inside of an investor banking firm, with no holds barred, which makes it probably one of the most recommended books for anyone considering more than a passing acquaintance with the investment banking industry.

A Great Read

What a great read. A friend of mine recommended this to me and I can say that it certainly was a refreshing read.This book tells you about some of the influential people who shaped Salomon Brothers and Wall St in the eighties. I never realised the history that went with Salomon Brothers.The style is great and I can really identify with the author's early years going through the stages of obtaining and starting a job. Some of the characters in the book are hilarious, you can only just believe they are real.Only one complaint: sometimes the author goes on for quite a long time with his history e.g. the history of junk bonds and the history of various people in SB. I only wish that there was more about the author's story.Only one gripe though, and it can't prevent this from being a 5 star book.Buy it now! Thanks to the book, I am now constantly searching for books like this but this is the only one I have found recounting the story of a salesman as opposed to a trader.

It made me laugh, it made me cry......

**** I read this book in my last undergraduate year of college. At that time, Lewis provided me with an eye-opening, first-hand glance of life in the high-flying world of finance (1980's) and the personalities that drove that period forward. It was relevant reading material since I was intending to pursue a career in the financial services industry, and here was a book written by a former bond salesman in the New York and London offices of Salomon Brothers. **** Nevertheless, this book is not limited to only those interested or involved in the world of business. This book is for anybody who is curious how the S & L crisis emerged; how the Reagan administration's deregulations affected the salaries of a select few in the US financial industry; how much the tax burden of the average American citizen grew as a result. This book is perfect for those who dislike the dry writing found in historical textbooks. **** Lewis's anecdotes will leave you in stitches! I am now working in the financial services industry. Most of the people I run into seem to have read this book at an earlier age and most enjoyed it as much as I did. **NOTE** Other "financial history" books that could be compared to "Liar's Poker", but written with very different writing styles: "Merchants of Debt" by George Anders; "Barbarians at the Gate".