Wall street just seems like one big Sigma Phi Kappa (audiobook)

For people who want to understand the peculiar failure modes of capitalism that have been illustrated by the bubbles, crashes, and bailouts of the past decade, Liar's Poker is required reading. Not that it provides solutions to the problems (far from it), but it illustrates the problem space perhaps better than any other book I know.

It does this by means of a sympathetic, yet introspective, portrayal of the vicious, base-natured villainy that is Wall Street Corporate culture. There is little room to doubt that the attitudes and practices presented in this book are directly responsible for far reaching problems affecting the world, yet it's easy to see why instead of being received as a warning the book was embraced as a how-to guide by a generation of ambitious would-be finance jockeys.

"Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London. There has never before been such a fantastic exception to the rule of the marketplace that one takes out no more than one puts in."

Consider this: I read this book shortly after Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy and concurrent with Kerouac's On The Road. I think in those two counter-cultural touchpoints there may be one or two figures who would not jump at the proposition above with both feet, but for most of them the embrace would be as instinctive as breathing. In a weird way, the Wall Street abuses were part of an unbroken continuum with that counter-culture. Sal Paradise would have done very well for himself here. At the same time, the subversion of the bourgeois ideal of incremental cumulative reward for societal benefits of ones labor is like a victory point scored by capitalism against itself. Imagine the high scoring games that would occur if soccer players could increase their salary by an order of magnitude with an own-goal.

The era Michael Lewis illustrates here didn't die or collapse at the end of the 80s, it has continued and if anything has become more extreme to the present day. However, it's difficult to blame the individuals for being self-interested (in the soulless, paranoid way of empty suits), or the politicians for not solving a problem when no solution is clearly possible. Like the attempts to introduce "balancing" factors to a biological ecosystem, each iteration makes the old problems worse while introducing new ones.

The genius of this book is that it is a highly enjoyable and readable frolic, which only becomes oppressive and dismal when you stand back and think about what it entails. Sadly, many readers never take that last step and flock to become the next generation of piranhas on Wall Street. Given the promise of millions of dollars for people with limited ability to contribute meaningfully to society, it's hard to blame them.

An honest attempt on the life of a bond trader: not the philosophy, nor the routine struggles but the very aspects of inside baseball, juicy gossips and harsh realities. It's not hard to see how careers were made in the 80s in a firm whose rise and fall happened in that decade. It never directly tells you anything other than office politics, but powerful tangents an average human can draw are insightful for an investment banking career.

I'm a little torn by this book. It's well written, it's funny in places, some of Michael Lewis' observations are very astute and I'm sure that on some level this is an excellent commentary on the downfall of a once great company. Lewis was a trainee bond trader at Salomon Brothers when that firm was the most profitable on Wall St. He did very well out of his time there, and his analysis both here and in another of his works, The Big Short, pinpoints several of the problems that society has, or should have, with how the financial system works.

Yet, having read The Blind Side, Lewis' views on how one position, and in particular one person playing in that position, changed American football, before both The Big Short and then Liar's Poker, I can't help disliking the author. Intensely. His previous two books had given me no reason for this at all, with the possible exception of a little smugness in 'Short'. However, Liar's Poker drips with 'I could see it coming from the second it began', 'I hated screwing clients but it was what I had to do' (every uniformed low-level goon in a dictatorship's first excuse) and 'all these people [bankers] are so horrible'. The venom he has for banking and bankers made me laugh out loud when the final line of the book informed the reader that Lewis lives in London with his wife, an investment banker. When you factor in that Lewis made vast sums of money from the profession, it's easy to see all this as disingenuous, and that's my conclusion. Once it was popular to want to be a banker, so Michael Lewis became a banker, now it's popular to hate them, so he hates them. I can't help but think that if everyone said tomorrow that they'd made a huge mistake and bankers were not to blame and that they are in fact wonderful, that Lewis would call a few contacts and be back at his trading post in minutes.

A fascinating account in general about a Wall Street investment bank, a rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Its very fast paced, but I guess it requires a basic level understanding of financial markets and the various instruments, to be enjoyed fully. I think I would have enjoyed my finance courses in b school better if I had read this earlier.

Super interesting and like his style of writing

Although I had known about this book for years and generally enjoy the work of Michael Lewis, I had not read this book until I picked up a very cheap e-book version ($2 or $3, I think) on Google Play. I really enjoyed the book, which benefits from Lewis' ability to explain complex financial concepts concisely and humorously and his ability to capture human personalities. Like another great book on Wall Street from the same time, Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," "Liar's Poker" is a bit dated and has a "Dr. Evil" quality when dollar values are cited ("$1 million dollars"). At the same time, the author was in many ways present at the dawn of the financialization of the American economy. One really can trace a straight line from Salomon Brother's creation of mortgage bonds to the housing crash and economic disaster of the past five years.

I was hoping for a better book from Michael Lewis. I read The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine before reading this, so my expectations might have been biased, but I was hoping for something that did more than illuminate some scandalous activity. It was minor league in that it attempted to illustrate some central characters in Solomon Brothers. Lewis does much better in making his characters palpable in The Big Short.

He touched upon this a couple times, but he never entirely pounced upon this: he should have written the book as an ethnography. It wavers in between ethnography, observations, spy story, and I think that wavering weakens it. It needs to be written as an ethnography by someone who clearly does not fit into the Solomon Brothers culture.

The explanation of finance and some financial activity is explained well. He explains in The Big Short that college graduates would read this book and ask him for advice, reading it as a training manual.

I was also hoping for a more lucid discussion of the recession in 1987. I thought the end was building up to it, but it did nothing to really captivate on the topic of Solomons' fall or the recession. The fall is inevitable, as explained early in the book. I have seen it written in other reviews: the parts about the training program and the first third of the book are the best. It is chaotically disorganized and jumpy.

Brilliant. Michael Lewis's first book describes his experiences as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s and it's simultaneously funny, engaging and profound.

Details well the positives, especially the innovators and innovations of the time - e.g. Lewis Ranieri, and collaterised mortgage obligations, and the negatives: the back-stabbing, the hubris, the mismanagement at the highest levels, the obscene salaries, the unethical treatment of clients. All done in a way that is constantly interesting and often funny.

Liar's Poker, part memoir part history, focuses on bond trading in the 80s, which doesn't exactly scream 'page turner'. But a page turner is exactly what Lewis delivers. He blends fast moving narrative, outrageous behaviour and actual financial history (I admit I have a professional interest in that part, I don't imagine everyone will find the origins of mortgage and junk bonds so gripping) into a book I didn't want to put down.

30 years later and the themes of greed, arrogance, and junior staff swallowing their integrity for the good of their employer are all just as relevant.

Highly recommend

Liar's Poker tells the story of Michael Lewis and his career on Wall Street during the eighties. In those days, it was almost like the wild west with people throwing money around. Then, the loss of massive sums of money (one hundred million and over) was something that was laughable and easily disregarded. Now, losing that amount of money would yield either a huge embarassment or an instantaeneous firing. Througout the book, Michael Lewis describes to macho-nature of the financial world by using slang terms, such as a human pirahana (someone who curses in every single sentence) and a big swinging dick (the head honcho in the room).
I liked this book a lot because Lewis blends his unique brand of deadpan humor with actual facts about his time on Wall Street. I find that is something that is really hard to do in a book because finding that perfect balance between truth and humor is near impossible. I also like it because the book had a lot of ramifications in the financial world. The book practically ended a few careers as it exposed many brokers for being loose with their money and becuase many people had just been pulled right out of high school. I just found that so interesting because it is very, very rare that you find a book that can do that.
I would reccomend this to anyone that enjoys book based on the financial world and anyone who enjoys books that mesh humor with real facts.

Wall Street is a hub of financial experts. These experts keep finding some gaps in the market, which could be exploited to make loads of money. That is the story of Salomon Brothers as told by Michael Lewis in an amusing way.

Bond traders are known for their unusual habit of playing “Liar’s Poker” a one-of-a-kind game that pushes anyone beyond its limits and questions your ability to make split-second-decision, judge risk and increase/decrease your wealth.

The book shows the rise and collapse of Salomon Brothers. In general, it focuses on how they managed to increase their influence with the help of unethical methods and which resulted in their quick downfall. Before the crash in 1987, Salomon fired thousands of employees as a result of inadequate policies and practices used to regain control over the market. The time for growth ended, with the rise of other competitors who replicated Salomon Brothers’ methods to be used against them.

Liar’s Poker showcases the egocentric culture that prevails on Wall Street. The book describes the complete lack of etiquette and ethics among the traders. Lewis’s reflections on how the environment corrupted his soul makes it quite clear that an outsider has to be very skeptical of what Wall Street is trying to convince you of. They usually have but one interest - to make money at the other's expense.