Liar's Poker : Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

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.

The wild story of a 26-year-old who noped right out of Wall Street when the eighties got crazy. The book tried to tell a cautionary tale. It inspired a generation to become bond traders instead.

Testosterone, colorful characters, palace coups and cynical money-making abound.

Worth every ounce of its reputation.

It didn't take long in my journey as an economics student to learn that the stock market effectively means nothing to the economy. It has become something of a mantra for me that the economy is not the stock market and the stock market is not the economy. As such, one of my biggest pet peeves is whenever someone posits that the economy is good / bad and their first piece of supporting "evidence" is the performance of the stock market. The stock market, from an economic point of view, is essentially a game of chance that people play with their money that reflects how people are feeling any given day (an explanation which one of my friends beautifully summarized as "astrology for finance bros" when I was on my soapbox about this one day). I had never taken much time to learn about the bond market during or after school (my interests are more along the microeconomic lines of game theory / industrial organization / trade theory rather than financial economics), but I had always assumed that this market was a little more tangible than stocks. I likely could have seen this coming from the title alone, but it quickly became clear through reading this book that the bond market is just as much of a game as the rest of what goes on on Wall Street.

One of the pervasive themes of this book is the all-encompassing fixation that Saloman Brothers and the other large Wall Street investment banks have on money. This manifests itself in two main ways that I found pretty detestable. The first was a disregard for customers who were viewed as less important (i.e., those who had less money to spend). These customers were treated as expendable, and firms leaned on several euphemisms to disguise the financial ruin in which some of these customers were left. This kind of dehumanization was pretty upsetting, and to Lewis's credit, he did not attempt to mask any of this behavior. The second consequence was a toxic and contentious atmosphere within the firm, especially toward women and workers who were more junior (minority workers would have presumably been on this list as well, but there were very few of them working at Saloman Brothers in the mid-1980's, which is a problem in itself). Lewis spent a decent amount of time covering the harassment of junior workers, which is understandable considering he himself experienced this treatment, but he spent much less time on the systemic efforts to withhold women from positions with influence or power. I believe Lewis's general methodology was to simply present the facts and allow the reader to arrive at their own conclusions, which is an approach that I broadly agree with, but I felt that this issue deserved a stronger indictment.

Overall, despite the level of disdain that I felt toward the greed that motivates many of the people in this book (and the amount of money they make doing work I view as relatively non-value-additive that enables this greed), I still found this book eye-opening and worthwhile. I don't think I can broadly recommend this book to all readers as some of the technical descriptions of the bond market would likely bore some people, but I think anyone who has existing interest in this general subject matter would likely get something out of reading this book.

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!

First book of this type I truly enjoyed. Thank you Lewis for opening up a new field of book to explore.

While this is probably Michael Lewis's most famous book, it is not my favorite. Lewis is always an engaging writer, but maybe because this is a recounting of a period of his life, and not an investigation into an exciting mystery or a study of a socialogical phenomenon, it's just not as fascinating as his other works.

The book is interesting, as it follows Lewis's journey from college interviews to working at top investment firm Salomon Brothers. The whole investment banking world is incredibly cutthroat, not surprisingly. The money to be made was incredible, and unfortunately the “snakes” of the world benefited from this. People who could sell worthless stuff for large sums of money were the heroes. People who had the best interests of their customers at heart were the losers.

A problem with this book is that it is somewhat dated—again, because it is a “diary” of time in Lewis's life and not just about an event that exists on its own. Honestly, I probably would have scored this higher and enjoyed it more if Lewis's other books weren't so absolutely fantastic!! Moneyball in particular is one of my favorite books and has been reread until it's somewhat tattered. I've loved every other book by Lewis, so this one suffers in comparison. Still a good read, if you are interested in the “good ol' days” of finance!

Đọc Lewis thì khỏi phải nói rồi, rất thỏa mãn ở khía cạnh giải trí. Đây có lẽ là một trong những quyển thú vị ngôn ngữ nhất về phố Wall (đọc là: buồn cười) mà tôi đọc được. Nếu Flash Boys hơi nặng tính kỹ thuật và chỉ trích, The Undoing Project thiên về tính lịch sử và thán phục thì Liar’s Poker, đúng như cái tên, nghiêng về những trò mánh khóe và lừa bịp (The Big Short và Moneyball thì tôi mới chỉ xem phim, chưa đọc sách).

Với những kinh nghiệm ít ỏi của tôi khi còn “ở bên trong” thị trường chứng khoán thì quả đúng là như vậy. Không phải ngẫu nhiên mà đây là nơi tập trung những kẻ thông minh nhất quả đất vào làm việc và chém giết nhau (nơi thông minh thứ nhì chắc là NASA).

Tóm lại là thống khoái.

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.