Lewis is a phenomenal writer, and it's important to keep in mind that this is his first book. The writing is strong, but not technically as well-developed as his later work (Blindside and Moneyball) but it has something that is often a feature of "first works" in a writer's career. It is deeply personal, and Lewis's Liar's Poker has more of Michael Lewis in it than the other books by a fairly substantial margin.

I really enjoy the book, and think that the personal elements of the storytelling are a big part of what makes it engaging and fun. The book has some serious moments, and some droning storytelling that doesn't seem to have as much of a point as it could. It's hard to say how some of the stories, which seem fairly redundant in expressing opulent or hierarchal elements of the corporate culture, are supposed to work in the book, and so it is easy to wonder if the editorial judgment was really there. This is, again, a standard feature of first works.

That said, I think that this is a worthwhile read, for those who are interested in finance or even simply those who are interested in the sort of good stories that Lewis is famous for telling. Engaging and fun, I find Lewis entertaining and thoughtful, and the fact that his personality is carried across so heavily in this book makes it a really fun read.

I liked it, it was a good journey through what it was like working in the financial industries, mainly in Salomon Brothers in the mid 80s. Basically, obscene amounts of money + people that "if they weren't salesmen would be truck drivers" = debauchery and frat-like behaviour. As some examples, the mortgage trading desk was apparently all fat - they would order $500 worth of mexican food for a couple of people, which as you can imagine is difficult, so included things like 5 gallon tubs of guacamole. The employees would play pranks on each other: for example, just before someone's flight, they would sneakily take his suitcase, take out all the clothes and replace them with paper towels.
On the information front I feel I learned a bunch from "Liar's Poker", mostly about mortgage backed securities and how they work.

Liar's Poker is a book about the days that Michael Lewis spent at Solomon Brothers as a Bond broker during the bond boom that took place starting in the 80's. The book is really entertaining and at the same time very informative. The book can be grouped into a few sections, that have very distinct focuses. The first is about the rise to prominence of Louie Ranieri to the head of the mortgage bond trading desk and his subsequent fall. The second is about Lewis' own experience in the London office of Solomon Brothers as a trader in the corporate bond department. The third section talks about Michael Milken , the junk bond czar, and his rise to power. I was amazed by the extent to which this whole industry is driven by Ego, cunning, opportunism, speculation, deceit, and street smarts. It is clear that the customer is a victim to be exploited by this industry.It is amazing to realize that institutional investors like pension funds and trusts make multi-billion dollar investments in some of these bonds which turn out to be little more than a speculative gambles of varying levels of risk. Some people become very rich some loose their shirts, and all the while the investment banks make huge profits. It is also thought provoking how laws enacted by the government can drive a whole industry. An example of this is home mortgages as a bond instrument.There is one characteristic of mortgages that make them uninteresting to the bond industry and that is the fact that they can be repaid at any time. Bonds are generally held to a maturity date. Who wants to hold a bond that can be repaid at any time ? The financial lobby tried like crazy to get congress to enact legislation to force a holder of a mortgage to hold it for full term or pay a penalty. This would make it more interesting as a debt instrument, to the detriment of the mortgage holder. This lead to a whole industry which is the CMO industry. Abuses in this industry ultimately lead to the housing bubble and the finanacial crisis 0f 2008. You can read Lewis' other book, The Big Short, for more details about this. In any case, if you want to read a first hand account of the inner workings of the wall street bond industry from an insider, this is a very good read.

I liked Moneyball, and The Big Short is one of my favorite books, but Liar's Poker was disappointing.

Since it is a story about life in an investment bank, I expected Wolf of Wall Street-style parties and debauchery, but none of that happened. In fact, nothing much at all happened in this book, which describes Lewis' brief tenure as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s.

A third of the book is about the training program, another third is about Lewis' year as a "geek" (a junior trader) and the remainder about his final year as a "big swinging d*ck" (a producing trader). The plot is episodic in nature, rather than a narrative with a plot. There are also lengthy sections about the history of the mortgage bond and junk bond markets. These sections were interesting - I didn't know that these markets essentially didn't exist until the 1980s - but they interrupt what little flow the main story has.

Unlike Moneyball, which focuses on Billy Beane, and the Big Short, which focuses on a handful of hedge fund managers, Liar's Poker does not develop any one character. We are introduced to a host of people, but there are no central figures in the story.

On the whole, Lewis provides an interesting look at the inside of an investment bank and some of the history of bond trading, but it paled in comparison to the other books Lewis has written.

This book surprised me. I read and enjoyed Lewis' Moneyball a while back, and thought I was getting another journalistic account, this time of a crazy moment in corporate culture. Instead, it's very much a memoir of that world. And I didn't care for it at first, since the group of people he writes about are so spectacularly awful. He brings a certain world of investment banking trainees home to you, and I wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the whole book, I don't think I could take it. Something like the way some people don't like The Office (esp. the BBC version); it's too painful to see such human lowness.

But I'm glad I stuck around, because he can really tell a story. The sense of battle, politicking, and putting up fronts. Wry observations. Big picture, little picture. He comes off as a whistle blower with no sense that he's betraying his world; just an inside man dissecting a world he finds amusing, deranged, and perversely fun.

Really fascinating, and I learned a lot!

Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis, focuses on two main points: the development of the mortgage securities and explaining the Wall Street culture, and an autobiography of his time working in mortgage securities. The author begins the book fresh out of Princeton, repeatedly denied a job at every firm he applied at until he unwittingly gets lucky at a party with a partner’s wife. Later, in order to show the Wall Street culture, Michael Lewis tells the story of how Lewie Ranieri created the mortgage securities department at Salomon Brothers. Lewis finishes off with his own personal experience in Wall Street working for Salomon Brothers overseas in London, surviving a near hostile takeover, and then leaving when Wall Street stopped matching with his values.
Despite being written almost twenty years ago, a lot of Liar's Poker remains relevant today. Liar’s poker explores Wall street in the 80s when financial institutions were “largely unregulated”. Humor in Wall Street was sexual and/or sexist toward women with terms like “big swinging dick” thrown around often. As an eighth grader with very little real background and no classes in economics, I appreciate the fact that they dumb everything down to terms that anyone can understand if only they read closely. I have watched and read several financial movies, books, and documentaries about Wall Street and economics but none have come close to explaining it in a way that young people and adolescents can understand, much less find humor in. The humor of the book stems from being blunt and full of potty humor. My favorite of the potty jokes being “But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.” One of my favorite examples of the books bluntness was “Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market” for how blunt and honest it is. Without a doubt, Liar’s Poker is one of the best books I’ve read although I would recommend it only to those with at least a basic understanding of economics and some time to kill.

Great fun and probably benefits from a read 20 years after the crazy time in the financial markets, particularly as 2008 seems to represent a reaping of the financial markets sowed in the late 80s.

Don't know much about the financial markets and you really don't need to to find this book entertaining. Lewis manages to give you both the feeling of a insider (he lived the time) but also acts as an external commentator on the excesses of the period as well as the key personalities.

Un nuevo libro sobre la serie de cataclismos financieros que tuvieron lugar en Wall Street a finales de los 80. El autor, Michael Lewis, era vendedor de bonos en la poderosa Salomon Brothers. La historia cuenta los comienzos de una época dorada para esta firma, que acaban con su decadencia y el auge de otra, el banco de inversión Drexel Burnham, que había creado un imperio de bonos basura (junk bonds), o bonos de alto riesgo. El libro está muy bien escrito. De nuevo, como me pasa siempre, siento una especial simpatía por el protagonista. A pesar de que era un tipo que ganó 90.000 dólares en su primer año y 225.000 en el segundo, le da a uno una especie de penita el ver cómo sufre los vaivenes que ocasionan las luchas intestinas de poder que toda empresa importante sufre.

El autor comienza contando el increíble proceso de casualidades que le llevaron a él, un licenciado en Historia del Arte, a entrar en los cursos de formación del banco Salomon Brothers, poseedor de un cuasimonopolio en el mercado de bonos norteamericano por aquellas fechas. Tras los avatares del curso de formación, nuestro protagonista es lanzado al mundo. Nos narra entonces cómo Salomon Brothers había llegado a ser lo que era, creando negocio donde no lo había. Especialmente interesante es la compleja historia de cómo un sólo hombre, Louie Ranieri, consiguió fabricar un bono sobre hipotecas que permitió transacciones de billones de dólares en varios años. Impresionante ejemplo de ingeniería financiera.

La parte final del libro narra los ocho días del crash financiero del 1987, y cómo afectaron a un banco que en aquél momento poseía el 31% de las acciones de British Petroleum, que se desplomó en bolsa. Cuenta también como Salomon Brothers dejó paso a Drexel Burnham, que había creado una rama de negocio llamada junk bonds, o bonos de alto riesgo, que era lo que estaba dando mucho dienero en aquel momento. Así, Salomon Brothers dejó su puesto a la cabeza de los bancos de inversión de Wall Street. Nuestro protagonista y narrador abandona la empresa en esos días, no porque le despidieran (hubo más de mil despidos sobre una fuerza laboral de 3500 personas) sino porque consideró que ya había visto lo suficiente.

Mi nota: Muy entretenido e interesante.

First third was pretty interesting about how he accidentally got into the investment banking industry. But then started being lackluster because there wasn't enough character development.

Update On Tuesday, March 1, 2016, I got a call, my banker that sounds weird, I'm not sure of the term, but the guy who looks after my account resigned from Morgan Stanley. He said they wanted to put the commission and charges clients pay up too much and that it has become Corruption Central. He says he'll phone me when he finds a new company. Does anything change?

My son who is in his last year at law school has a job already with Goldman Sachs. Is he going to become very rich and very corrupt? Will I care as much when it is my son and not my money?
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Liar's Poker is the ultra high-stakes game played in Wall Street companies by the brokers with the obscenely high commissions they get from trading in the investment market.

What results is either extreme wealth and satisfaction - probably quite a few of these people are psychopaths or guilt and a change in career, or they become just like the American Psycho, a rather fun fictional book on the ultimate psycho on Wall Street.

The book is highly recommended for lots of open-mouthed, "geez, people act like that", say things like that moments and because Michael Lewis, as always, knows his subject well and writes about it in a very entertaining and non-dry way. Great read.

The author quite obviously dislikes and has nothing but contempt for the banking industry - he resigned from Salomon Brothers to write this book but at the time was still married to Diana de Cordova, an investment banker with Morgan Stanley. I wonder if his book had anything to do with the marriage breaking down? He married twice more, both tv journalists, but got out of banking completely and into writing best-selling books. At least his time was his own.
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I've been reading other reviews of this book and I hadn't realised that it was over 20 years old. It reads like it could have been written about the overblown corruption of the Finance market right now that explodes into the press every few years. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, at least with Wall Street.

21 years after publication, Liar's Poker feels both relevant and ancient. Relevant because it seems the Big Swinging Dicks of Wall Street are ever with us; ancient because of references to things like WATS lines and the lionizing of Salomon Brothers trader John Meriwether, whose Long-Term Capital Management would spectacularly implode in 1998, and Michael Milken, who apparently had not yet been indicted when the book went to press but got a 10-year prison sentence for securities violations.

Lewis is a raconteur more than a documentarian, which is both pleasing and irritating. Certainly raconteurs can sell more books. Most people don't want to read dry scholarly accounts of Wall Street. But there are times in the book (most of chapters 1-4) where his writerly persona is so big that it crowds out everything else. His tone is so arch, snarky, exaggerated, so swimming in eddies of simile and metaphor, that I don't completely believe him (though I'm sure the vague outlines of his story are true). He pairs bravado with disarming self-deprecation, telling us repeatedly how he was utterly green, knew nothing, stumbled his way through everything, yet brought a trader who had wronged him to his knees, and by the time he left Salomon was earning the largest bonus of his class (undeserved, he insists). He steps away from the tales of towel-slapping long enough to give a detailed history of the rise of mortgage trading at Salomon Brothers and how Salomon management allowed hegemony to slip through their fingers. (Raising the question, how did such a junior employee know so much about a) the mortgage market, and b) the internecine battles among Salomon bigwigs?) The portrait he paints of Salomon's chairman John Gutfreund is fairly devastating (though ancient history; Gutfreund would be forced out by Warren Buffett in 1991 after a Treasury bond scandal).

Some examples of his raconteurship:

Ranieri welded a coherent departmental personality out of two separate but equally gamy ethnic groups. (Italians and Jews, if you care.)

Buying whole loans (that is what the traders called home loans, to distinguish them from mortgage bonds) was an act of faith, like eating bologna.

For each step forward in market technology they [the traders:] took a step backward in human evolution...they became louder, ruder, fatter...

Their days began at 8 a.m. with a round of onion cheeseburgers. "We'd order four hundred dollars of Mexican food," says a former trader. "You can't buy four hundred dollars of Mexican food. But we'd try - guacamole in five-gallon drums, for a start. A customer would call in and ask us to bid or offer bonds, and you'd have to say, 'I'm sorry, but we're in the middle of the feeding frenzy. I'll have to call you back.'"