Michael Lewis lives up to his reputation with this book. It’s quite entertaining and provides an interesting perspective on Wall Street’s culture (at least in the 80s), which is often not as serious as it seems from the outside. It also provides some interesting insight into the early roots of the global financial crisis. I think I would have enjoyed if Lewis had included more high-level reflection on the role of institutions like Solomon Brothers and the effects of glorification of Wall Street - much of what sticks with me years after reading are the silly stories about various shenanigans in the office.

Lewis' easy writing style makes this book enjoyable for anyone interested in learning, from an insider, how one of the most powerful Investment Banks in the 80's operated. The book is a recollection from his time at Salomon Brothers, and includes great self reflections regarding what was/is so wrong about this industry.

Student perspective:

I am very new to investment banking, and I found this book really great. It tells many things about what happens inside of investment banks. Of course, a little bit background of finance is required (khanacademy.org is enough) to understand things. The best things I liked about this book is that the author shares all the actual trading incidents that happened and how they made money by exploiting each situation. This book also explains some things about corporate structure (I have never worked in an actual company so this was new to me), all the office politics and power games. This book gives a perfect picture about how a typical trader/salesman's thinking when he/she is at work.

I would highly recommend this book to students who are looking out for internships/jobs in the investment banking sector.

Dieses Buch handelt fast ausschließlich von Dingen, die mich noch nie interessiert haben, und ich fand es mit Ausnahme einiger weniger Abschnitte bildend und lustig. (Bildend = man lernt in erster Linie was über Firmenkultur; über die spezifischen Wall-Street-Angelegenheiten nur nebenbei.) Es ist nicht ganz so super wie "Flash Boys" oder "The Undoing Project" vom selben Autor, aber immer noch sehr gut. Ich muss noch mehr von ihm lesen, um vielleicht eines Tages herauszufinden, wie man so was macht.

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.

This book is far more interesting than a book about life as a bond trader in the 1980s has any right to be. Michael Lewis is a captivating writer who experienced the highs and lows of working for one of Wall Street’s largest investment banks in the 1980s. He married entertaining anecdotes about working on a fast-paced trading floor with historical context on the creation of mortgage-backed securities and junk bonds in a way that kept me wanting more until it was over. I will definitely be reading his book The Big Short to understand what happened during the 2008 housing crisis.

I resonated a lot with Lewis’ take on what he calls “the money belief” (keep in my mind that he was making $200k+ per year at the age of 24 in 1985). “For me, however, the belief in the meaning of making dollars crumbled. The proposition that the more money you earn, the better the life you are leading was refuted by too much hard evidence to the contrary. And without that belief, I lost the need to make huge sums of money.” Little is more elusive and illusory than the pursuit of “enough money.” I’m convinced that you can only be satisfied with the amount of money you have if you truly don’t care about how much money you have.

My own brief foray into day trading using Robinhood was enough to convince me that speculation is not for me. It’s definitely exciting, but I think anything that gives you an outsized amount of money compared to the amount of effort you put into it inherently leads to an unhealthy view on money. From an eternal perspective, stumbling upon a large sum of money is no different than stumbling upon a large sum of video game currency. It can provide you with some temporary happiness, but when you leave the game it doesn’t mean anything.

I looked up the following terms while reading this book: dilettante, nouveau, pleb, penury, bête noire, reductio ad absurdum, gourmand, parochial, Teutonic, niggle, Canaletto, golden handshake, oleaginous, geld, xenophobia

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.

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.

I found this worn down bestseller in the investing for dummies section at the library. I read it in a few days and I have a short attention span so it's a good read. This could be easily made into a movie and the author has written books such as Blind Side and Moneyball which were turned into movies.

This is all about the life of a Wall Street bond salesman in a big firm called Salomon Brothers, the firm basically, in the 1980s. It mixes biography with the rise and fall of a company. The company still exists, so maybe not fall, but it's decline as being the top dog. A lot of ruthless horrible people just trying to make money basically.

If you are new to investing, it's a good read since it talks about some concepts that you may not have heard of such as junk bonds and selling mortgage bonds. I had to look up some of the terms.

All the short quick stories of where the term big swinging dick came from and him talking to his trader friend like two old Jewish grandmothers is entertaining. Just a lot of entertaining crazy day in the life of a big shot type of thing.

Who needs fiction when real life is this fantastic?

I've been always interested in the 2008 financial crisis and in this book I learned the origin story of the monstrisity of the bond market that led to the financial crisis. Unfortunately I read it in my native language and the translation was quite horrible. But the book itself was entertaining and gave more insight of day to day on Wall Street and it's politics.

Super interesting and like his style of writing