Good storyteller.
Slow beginning with many chapters to give historical context. Still very interesting, and I found myself shaking my head several times. Sometimes also humorous.

Combines great with "Barbarians at the Gate" to show the craziness of the 80s. Both are highly recommended.

I finished this two days ago but I keep falling behind on posting my reading updates

What’s incredible about Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker is just how funny it is. You want to be mad at all of these people for ruining the world, but they’re so ridiculous, you often can’t help but laugh.

I’m more than familiar with Lewis’ work. Moneyball is one of my all-time favorite novels. The Big Short had me real angry. Lewis is one of the great journalists of my time. This was the book that kick started his career. And he didn’t need long to discover his writing voice.

Alternating between his time as a bond trader at the once-mighty giant Salomon Brothers and the history of the powerful-but-doomed firm, Lewis gives us a revealing look at the grotesque greed and shameless pursuit of wealth that made 80s Wall Street what it was. I got a taste of this in Thomas Dyja’s New York, New York, New York, which made me want to finally try this one. If anything, Dyja undersells it. Wall Street might have been heading towards deregulation by the early-80s but the Reagan era truly let the damn burst.

Though Reagan is barely mentioned in the book, Paul Volcker looms over it all. Technically a Carter appointee, Volcker’s willingness to turn the debt spigot on in exchange for deflation led America to a decade of prosperity…on paper only as we saw with the Black Monday crash in 1987. Lewis accurately captures the mood of the times and how bond traders exploited every rule regardless of scruples.

The story remains prescient through today’s respective fiscal crises. It’s apparent we learned nothing as history repeated itself 21 years later in more frightening form. America is a land of opportunity. Liar’s Poker shows that the easiest way to get those opportunities is through greed.

Atlas Shrugged for the philistine. It's subtle glorification of the greedy, underneath a veneer of hilarious sarcasm and grudging respect is the stuff financial Bibles are made of.

An interesting slice of financial history is captured succinctly, more precisely the development of Collaterized Mortgage Obligations in the 80's which also has direct relevance to the recent U.S housing crisis.

If you wish to get everything you can out of this book, get your Finance 101 straight. It'll be a lot more fun.

Eerie to read the 1980s description of the 2000s financial crisis. Everything old is new again. And Lewis is just an incredible non-fiction writer, weaving anecdotes with explanations.

I have read a few books by this author and Liar’s Poker might be my favorite. I enjoyed that in Liar’s Poker Lewis was able to tell stories that he experienced first hand, which allowed him to provide some additional - and often funny - details. I also appreciated the opportunity to learn more about financial history, without having to drudge through a dry financial book.

Reading Liar’s Poker might also motivate me to read Lewis’ other book, The Big Short (or at least rewatch the movie), since some of the events explained in Liar’s Poker set the stage for the Great Recession.

Ultimately this is a fun and quick read for anyone interested in finance/economics. Thanks to my bro @Dylan for the recommendation.

Probably the least interesting thing by Michael Lewis that I've read. Billed as an expose of Wall Street greed, I found it more to be a story of incompetent management and political infighting by conceited executives who found themselves successful by being in the right place at the right time, but think themselves as geniuses.

Some of this reminded me a lot of my father's stories of the politics at his former law practice. Why anyone would want to work in a place with so much backstabbing and viscousness is beyond me. Shows the value of company culture.

It's funny to see Lewis wishing the company had been bought out by private equity firms just so they would fire the management. To me this book is another example that companies can sometimes be successful in spite of their leaders if they have a decent product and some luck.

Michael lewis always does a fantastic job narrating and describing seemingly bland topics in intriguing and captivating way.

His description of Lewis Ranieri and his team of glutinous pranking bond traders is downright hilarious, but after standing still for a brief second one realises how harrowing it actually is that one man can form a financial market that we know today.

I did find his personal stories at Salomon brothers to be more engrossing than the story of Salomons brother climb to the top. Sometimes the initial story of Salomon brothers be tiresome and badly written compared to the rest of the book/Michael Lewis’ other books.

Michael Lewis stated that he wrote liars poker as a cautionary tale, but as he states in his own book, people love risk, and what he describes is a high risk poker game with a couple drops of brotherhood sprinkled in. How could he not envision that young hungry university students would be drawn to this world?

pp 83 is a discussion of S&L's failure in the US.
pp 136 is the best explanation of CMO's I've ever read.

Great read. Initially loaned to me by a coworker. I went out and bought it shortly thereafter.

A former art student winds up becoming a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers in the mid 1980's. He sees a lot, and describes it vividly. Chernobyl. The October Crash of 1987. Gutfreund and Meriwether quibbling over how much to bet in one hand of the title game.

He introduces some terms to the lexicon that persist to this day: BSD- as used in the movie Boiler Room. Good deal of relevant information for both the average investor as well as the seasoned professional. When the news about Chernobyl breaks Mike's good friend has some advice for him, "Buy potatoes." This is a powerful illustration of how traders, not investors, think.

A spread, any spread...

Well, I went through hell reading this book. But I was partly to blame because I put too much trust in the author hoping he will make matters easier to understand but clearly he didn't think it necessary. Anw, it still expanded my narrow mind a little bit. The dry humor, wisdom as well as humility of the author breathes a refreshing air into such a corrupt industry. Will try to return to this in the future!

No need to recount the reviews of over 2 decades. I'll just say that it is extremely relevant today in 2015 as it was in 1989. The Solomon traders created the foundation on which the mortgage market would balloon and eventually collapse in 2008. It reminds the readers that financial engineering is completely unproductive and dangerous, making a few rich and society to foot the eventual bill. It is also insightful into how corporate culture can promote greed and the worst of human nature to build and ultimately destroy companies.

Reading this book was like attending a reunion for the 1980s. Many attending look familiar but you can't quite remember them, others leap out as OMG there's Milken! And MCI! Others you don't recognize at all until somone reminds you. Just like any reunion, there are good, bad and indifferent memories and interactions.

This is Lewis' memoir of his years at Salomon Brothers as a bond trader under John Gutfreund. It is also a biography of the rise and first fall of the mortgage backed securities/bond market which was invented by Salomon. It is in a sense a memoir of a world whose edges I glanced past in the 1980s, as a young transactions lawyer who also represented coops and condos as general counsel (which in fact I still do nearly 40 years later). You see, I was involved in closing the residential mortgages that gave rise to the thrifts, and the commercial mortgages that also were all fed into the securitizations sold as bonds. I also was there during the crash of 1987 and the subsequent workouts with banks and government. Banks came and went. Products offered by banks came and went. Still do. I also had as clients many of those bond traders -- either directly as they bought and sold apartments and indirectly as they served on coop and condo boards in the buildings in which they owned apartments. This was such a nostalgia read. But it's also completely relevant to day because it is all still present and infact led to another crash in 2008, and I'm sure will lead to yet another at some future point. It's the nature of the business; it's a blood sport.

For those not on a nostalgia trip - and I did not set out for one - this is an excellent read on two levels: it's an engaging story of one young bond trader's experience before turning to writing full time, and it's incredibly well written in explaining how it all works, i.e. bonds, thrifts, swaps, difference among the investment houses, and so on. Lewis does a great job alternating between personal story, anecdotes, factual information, and explaining tough concepts.

There's one particular bit near the beginning that I intend to share with a client of mine. It talks about interest-rate swaps which were invented around 1980 and still appear now and again. A year ago a client of mine was nearly suckered into an interest rate swap on a commercial loan he was taking out to purchase his office condo. Before signing the commitment, he wisely sent it to me to review. When after several readings of the description of the interest rate swap (which basically is how the interest rate and thus monthly payment was going to be for the 10 year term of the mortgage) and an in depth discussion with the banker 'selling' my client the loan, I could not understand what his payment per month was going to be or how calculated. I called a colleague who is a commercial mortgage broker and asked him what the f--- this was or had I become stupid, he told me that it is all smoke and mirrors and that the rate would adjust constantly, that monthly payments would not be fixed. I called my client and told him to forget it (turned out he didn't understand it at all either) - and he went with a fixed interest rate. Good thing too because a month later rates started skyrocketing and he would have been screwed under the swap set up. But it shows you that all the stratagems and ploys circle back again and again.