A plot is set up, then things happen, and then finally there's a conclusion. That's what makes a story. Right? Wrong.

Michael Lewis is a brilliant writer. He catches the reader's fancy from the get go. But Liar's Poker doesn't really have a plot. It's not based on a singular event -- a market crash, a scam, or whatever. Instead, it's part memoir, part deep look inside the world of investment banking. Or maybe just one investment bank Salomon Brothers, where Lewis worked for ~2 years.

Liar's Poker is a primer into investment banking. He tells it like it is, there's no glorification, and no undue vilification of either the profession or any individual character. He knows how to tell a story, even if there's no plot, and there was not a single page in the book that dragged or felt like it didn't fit.

Most investment bankers, turns out, are just glorified salesmen. Bonds' salesmen, in this particular instance. They call up fund managers and try to feed them shit so that they buy whatever they want to sell. I mean, at least some salesmen do that. Or did that, this book was published decades ago.

Now why would a fund manager buy a bond or some other complex financial instrument out of nowhere 'cause some guy called him to sell it to whom? I really don't know. It's mostly greed. But fund managers do do that (or did that). And the investment banks where these salesmen work are darn fucking rich, so they have darn fucking good images (dapper suits and fancy restaurants help for sure). But the investment banks aren't the fund manager's friends. They're just middlemen with conflicts of interest at every point and you can never be sure of which interest they're furthering at which point in time.

Essentially, unless you're a big, big fish, dealing with investment banks is a massive gamble. They're not out there looking for your interests. As with any agent/broker/middleman.

Lewis intersperses his writing on how investment banks operate with his own moral dilemmas. Bankers love to think that they "deserve" all the money they end up making (hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, back in the '80s!). Lewis is unambiguous in his thoughts that he didn't deserve it. He gives us a brief insight into his dilemma in the epilogue and I love the measured, reflective individual I see there.

Undoubtedly a classic for the ages. If you know nothing about finance, read this book, google a little, and you'll come out with both knowledge and emotions (and dazzled by the humour).

A fascinating fun read of the life and times of Salomon Brothers. The first part of the book, which covered Lewis' hiring and orientation, had a feel of Scott Turow's "1L", and was the most entertaining. The rest was interesting, although this reader was left with the lingering ickiness of the 1980s financial excesses.

Fresh off the trading floor of the Salomon Brothers London office in 1989, Michael Lewis offers an insider's account of life on Wall Street in his first novel. Lewis masterfully details how the mortgage bond boom on the 41st floor of Salomon Brothers in the early 80s propelled the firm to world dominance. This is a tale of greed, however, as he provides an interesting perspective on management's inability to see minds on the floor as the firm's greatest asset, ultimately leading to its fall from grace. Of all the terrifying things about our financial system that Lewis highlights throughout the book, perhaps the most eerie is its precise foreshadowing of the 2008 crash. I encourage you not to get bogged down in the minutiae of bonds as you take this journey, but come away understanding that “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king." Along the way, Lewis provides some funny stories, and reflects on his own path to becoming a Big Swinging Dick. When it comes to the market, "Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know."

Witty. Hilarious. Thoroughly enjoyed reading this one. An interesting peek into the world of trading in the 1980’s. The book is the author’s account of his stint at Salomon Brothers and the ruthless corporate games that ensued around then (included as a part, is also the story behind inception of mortgage and junk bonds, and the brains behind them). Now I haven’t read many corporate stories , but I’m sure what unfolds here is among the best.

The book also ends with a small note from the author on why he quit the bank after two successful years and a refreshing perspective on the money belief( refreshing not because it is something very new but cause it makes sense and needs to be reminded every so often to the humankind).

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.

Liar's Poker is that one book everyone possibly has heard of as one of the most funniest books on finance. It is true that I did pick it up for a small introduction to finance. What I read however was an extraordinary account of the corporate world from how they hire to how they make sudden decisions to fire the same employees. The intervening events of trading, how they deal with clients, etc. feature too. Contrary to what I thought, the central focus is not Wall Street but Salamon Inc.

This book can make anyone laugh out loud (not just giggle), and I've never really experienced that with a book before. It begins by describing events of a Salamon training programme for chosen candidates and their journey in becoming "big swinging dicks." Yes, that's the phrase they use, and you'll find it a hundred times. Other catch phrases include equities in dallas, the human piranha, etc.

One of my favorite parts to read was the creation of the mortgage department by Lewis Ranieri within Salamon Inc.; because this department is the single reason USA started securitizing its mortgages to resemble stocks and making ordinary homebuyers a victim of speculations. Anyhow, if one knows enough about the Global Financial Crisis, one can also identify its origin in the mortgage department of Salamon as described in this book. While describing such serious events, Michael does not forget to sprinkle hilarious details such as how much the mortgage department spent on food, and how they stamped over the corporate, government traders.

Altogether, it was one of the most funniest and easiest introductions to finance and big corporates. It offers one of the best explanations to CMOs for real.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This was a fascinating book to be reading in the midst of the biggest financial crisis of the past 75 years. Liar's Poker records the author's experience as a bonds trader for Solomon Brothers, at the height of the 80's trading explosion - an accurate, and frightening, account of the ludicrous nature of the whole industry. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the book is the attitude of the traders: to make money at any cost, regardless of the consequences. In this world, it was perfectly acceptable to "blow-up" (bankrupt) a customer with a trade, because the company would make a hefty commission, regardless of the outcome for the others involved in the trade.

It's easy to see how the groundwork for our current financial mess was laid in this environment. Lewis talks about how new sources of income were constantly being made by cutting up bonds into new derivative securities - similar to the derivatives used from the sub-prime mortgages. When they mortgages collapses, so did all the derivative securities - but the obfuscation was deep enough so that many, many people bought those derivatives who should have known better.

Overall, Liar's Poker is well-written and entertaining enough to recommend to anyone, but it's also a disturbingly enlightening lens through which to see our current financial struggles.

A great book which shows first hand experience of a trainee when he enters the bond market when it was at its peak. It showcases the care (pun intended) that Salomon Brothers and like took of their clients. A person with a portfolio of less than 100M is a scapegoat and guinea pig for the trainee's On the Job training. The fat paychecks that the bond traders and bond salesmen draw for duping the clients basis the fact that they know a little more than the clients is quite hilarious. However, in due course of time, through continuous learning, when you develop good relationship with clients and your conscience haunts you and you learn the trade secrets, you would eventually want not to dupe the clients :P.

Another interesting track in the events take place when you realize how office politics destroyed a firm, that could have been a leader in other market segments, such as money market. Overall, an interesting read if you want to know about how life is for a trader/bond salesman and why do companies fall due to internal politics.

Food for thought - Would you want to be a part of office politics, rise in life(maybe) and nosedive (maybe) [ Ranieri, Gutfreund] or you would want to shy away from the politics, do your work and go with the paycheck after every month and repeat the process month after month [Dash]