Thank Jeebus and Gutfreund this early book was successful because it is hard to imagine experiencing this last bear market without the funny, clear narrative genius that is Michael Lewis.

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?

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.

Funny and Insightful

Out of date alpha male esque American psycho type of book. Didn’t enjoy it really and was really ready for it to be done.

Entertaining chronicles of a bunch of clever thugs! The author does a great job of pulling away the veil of jargon to expose a lot of the traders' moves for what they truly are- WAYS TO PROFIT FROM COMMISSION!!! Took a while to process the first half of the book, but by the second half I could barely keep it down. I sped through the last few chapters fuelled simultaneously by schadenfreude and absolute astonishment at the ways in which a lot of the management still got away pretty much unscathed in what seemed like "dire circumstances" for Salomon.

My very basic personal takeaway is to never be intimidated by FinBros lol.

Might reread in the future when I become more familiar with the jargon to see if I missed nuances.

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.

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.

I am a big fan of Michael Lewis so it is hard for me to be objective in a review but I do think this book is brilliant.
Personally I have not read a better book that sums up the greed and gluttony of 1980's Wall Street.
One thing that I found fascinating, especially with our recent financial collapse and history to compare and contrast, is that this book so clearly shows that as smart and as slick as some people can be in their quest to get rich in the financial markets ultimately Wall Street is simply one big giant casino and the people that work there are for the most part simply gamblers.

Not impressed.

Way back in 2008 when Lehman Brothers had just folded and I was preparing for CAT exams, this book got added to my TBR as the book that will explain it all. Finally in 2022, I read the book. A lot had changed including my outlook on financial instruments (I don't understand), investment bankers (have money don't have a life) and even the concept of money (an illusion).

The book starts out as an earnest effort to explain the disillusionment of investment banking, expose corporate greed and then the inevitable politics when it comes to power. The complexity of the instruments themselves and the cluelessness of the customers who trade in them making huge money - though true, is something I despised. So all through the downward spiral of the author's experience and the organisation's fortunes - I could not wait for it to come down. By that logic it was long drawn.

The home mortgage instruments origin (thrift instruments) was a trivia of sorts and the German bonds episode an anecdote for pettiness. The last part of the company takeover and layoffs I sort of speed read skipping a few pages (something I dont do normally). I felt bored and desperate to get the book over with and it is never a good sign.

Skip it and you won't miss a thing.

When a single game of Liar's Poker is played with a million dollars at stake at a workplace, just what, or whom, in the world are you dealing with? The most money-hungry industry, probably. Wall Street, ding, ding!

Money is a nebulous thing, and when you start dealing in the millions, perhaps billions, over a telephone, what happens to you and your soul? When Savings & Loans managers sell out for a chance to play in the big leagues, the world slides into Pottersville. Liar's Poker makes you feel like there are no more George Baileys left, and that's a tragic and cynical view indeed. Aspects of bond trading are like the rest of Wall Street finance—one of those deliberately arcane subjects, meant to prevaricate and hoodwink. Michael Lewis gives you a true insider look at what goes on, uniquely positioned with his experience as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers when the firm was the king of trading back in the mid to late 80s. He reveals his serendipitous start and the series of playground-like rituals that governed a new class of "geeks" hell-bent on climbing the ladder to become one of those classic "corporate finance" people. It's a wacky combination of luck, self-aggrandizement, connections, and risk-taking. This story is not meant to be triumphant, yet nor does it fully succeed as a take-down.

In the aftermath of his time at Salomon Brothers, Lewis has enough self-awareness to remark: "Christ, if social contribution had been the measure, I should have been billed rather than paid at the end of the year." He has plenty of ascerbic commentary to go around, yet Liar's Poker simultaneously revels in the posturing and the culture of being on a trading floor: the desire of every trainee to become a BSD (aka Big Swinging Dick (classy, I know)); to ruthlessly demand a bigger bonus in the second or third year of working or threaten to leave the firm (which hordes of Salomon Brothers' employees did); to get away with screwing over as many customers as possible (pat on the back and a fatter paycheck if you exploit their weaknesses!). When Lewis was in the game of bond trading, he very much embodied the things that can seem so awful about investment firms. Much of them twenty-something-year-olds, poised as if on top of the world with a humanitarian streak nowhere to be found. Instead, the streak torrent of self-interest and entitlement harbored by all these individuals left an acrid taste in my mouth, only made less pungent by Lewis's natural humor, sarcasm, and self-deprecation.

This book will work for some people. I much preferred Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine to Liar's Poker. This is really a "me, not you" problem. I find economics can be an interesting topic, but I personally don't think I cared enough about bonds in the way that I felt an abiding interest in the 2008 housing crisis. Here, you can see the disaster (the 2008 one, not just the stock market crash in 1987) in the making: absurdly irresponsible and profligate management while opportunistic ignorance and greed remained supreme. If there's a more positive way to describe Wall Street, please enlighten me...

I can only stomach that kind of subject material for so long. I only want to read about selfish and borderline detestable human beings for so long. The saddest realization is that it feels as if so little has changed or even that it has gone downhill, 30 years after this book has been published. 1980s Wall Street and today's Wall Street do not seem so different. There is always a Next Big Thing that rakes in the cash for the finance/investment industry. The entrance of junk bonds then, subprime mortgage loans in the 2008 crisis. When our stock market is careening up and down because of coronavirus right now and the coming year(s) of our economy look bleak, who knows what Wall Street is conjuring up right now? Experience would dictate that it's probably not good.

By the end of this book, I felt enormously wearied and disillusioned, much the way that Lewis felt when he quit his job. Would that he stayed, he could be much richer and the world would be much poorer. All the respect to him for leaving, but this book has also left me, inevitably, too cynical. I don't care if it's not Christmas right now; I need to go watch It's a Wonderful Life again.

This was a pretty fun account of life inside a Wall Street bank in the 80's, although I understand it is still somewhat applicable today. The storytelling is good, but I lost some interest in many of the characters and details as the book went on. I also didn't care for the crudeness (heavy amounts of swearing).

I first heard about this book in the early 2000's in an Economics class, so I've wanted to read it for quite some time. It's the 3rd Michael Lewis book I've finished.

Michael Lewis has a podcast, Against the Rules, in which he revisits Liar's Poker. It makes for a great epilogue.