This is the author's narrative of his experience working at Salomon Brothers, at one time the biggest investment bank on Wall Street and probably the world. The book is a sarcastic look into the world of high finance with wit and humor laced in the narrative. Investment banks are generally known as the hotbed of high net worth employees who sell products (equities, debt, bonds and mortgages here) to gullible, often clueless, investors at huge profits to satisfy their ever-increasing appetite for humongous profits. Corporate greed is the underlying message of the book and the cast of characters are the unscrupulous traders dotting the landscape.

The author is actually an art history student who somehow stumbles onto to the investment banking job, mainly just because every smart ivy League graduate seemed to be joining one. Somewhere down the years he is somewhat disillusioned by the profession and quits. The book is definitely insightful and educative. Some terms like CMOs, junk bonds etc are so lucidly explained that even a layman will be able to understand. Reading this book 30 years after it was first published. So many changes have taken place and so many firms have ceased to exist since. The book is funny at places but monotony of the narrative gets to you after a point of time.

I'm a little torn by this book. It's well written, it's funny in places, some of Michael Lewis' observations are very astute and I'm sure that on some level this is an excellent commentary on the downfall of a once great company. Lewis was a trainee bond trader at Salomon Brothers when that firm was the most profitable on Wall St. He did very well out of his time there, and his analysis both here and in another of his works, The Big Short, pinpoints several of the problems that society has, or should have, with how the financial system works.

Yet, having read The Blind Side, Lewis' views on how one position, and in particular one person playing in that position, changed American football, before both The Big Short and then Liar's Poker, I can't help disliking the author. Intensely. His previous two books had given me no reason for this at all, with the possible exception of a little smugness in 'Short'. However, Liar's Poker drips with 'I could see it coming from the second it began', 'I hated screwing clients but it was what I had to do' (every uniformed low-level goon in a dictatorship's first excuse) and 'all these people [bankers] are so horrible'. The venom he has for banking and bankers made me laugh out loud when the final line of the book informed the reader that Lewis lives in London with his wife, an investment banker. When you factor in that Lewis made vast sums of money from the profession, it's easy to see all this as disingenuous, and that's my conclusion. Once it was popular to want to be a banker, so Michael Lewis became a banker, now it's popular to hate them, so he hates them. I can't help but think that if everyone said tomorrow that they'd made a huge mistake and bankers were not to blame and that they are in fact wonderful, that Lewis would call a few contacts and be back at his trading post in minutes.

1980 Wall Street.

Michael Lewis's personal account of working at the Wall Street. Wild ride of working at Solomon Brothers, making and looking millions. Since then there are some changes are made, but are they enough?

First third was pretty interesting about how he accidentally got into the investment banking industry. But then started being lackluster because there wasn't enough character development.

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.

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.

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.

A brilliant and funny memoir of life on Wall Street in the 1980s. Michael Lewis shows exactly how craven and self-serving his firm, Salomon Brothers, had become by the time of his arrival in 1985. Previously a backwater, Jewish-led, bond trading firm, Salomon rode the wave of leverage in the Reagan era to become the most profitable investment bank in the world. Yet part of that success came from keeping good deals on its own books and passing bad bets to its customers. Lewis describes his first qualms and eventual acceptance of "jamming" bad bond deals down the throats of European investors and the praise from his superiors whenever he had sold a horrible deal. For instance, after selling some crappy AT&T bonds to a German investor he was praised as corporate hero, though he had to endure the "primal Teutonic scream" of his irate customer on an almost daily basis thereafter. As one of the teachers at his training program told him "Some people were born customers," meaning born-suckers. (Not surprisingly, Salomon's irate customers soon stopped taking the abuse and not long after Lewis published this book it was bought up by Traveler's Group and later Citi.)

Perhaps most interesting for those reading the book today, Lewis takes a strange 100-page segue to describe the history of mortgage-backed securities, the first of which was sold by Salomon brothers trader Lewis Ranieri in 1979. He describes the MBS as an only slightly less important financial innovation than junk bonds, which, in light of current events, is an amazing understatement. Lewis, who has a fine eye for business culture, describes how Ranieri self-consciously assembled a group of fat, slovenly, back-office Italian traders (their words) to compete in the then impoverished mortgage market. He strove to create his own oppositional culture inside the increasingly WASPish firm, and, after Congress liberalized Savings and Loans investment rules in 1982, his band of misfits became some of the most profitable traders on planet earth. The rest is history.

Parts of the book move surprisingly slow (he takes almost a 100 pages describing his training program), and I wish there was more focus on his own experience as a salesman, but all of it is engaging and well-written. It's a great inside look at how Wall Street worked, and works.

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]

I think that Michael Lewis is a superb writer. He takes a complex topic, such as mortgage-backed securities, and explains them so that your every(wo)man can understand them. He is also a great observer of human character, and he writes about people with great aplomb. I feel as if I personally know his characters. While the subject matter of investment banking in the 1980s is filled with blind greed, leaving the reader disgusted, Lewis manages to make this book a fabulous read.

Super interesting and like his style of writing

A nicely written book on saloman brothers and the start of its downfall. lewis has penned what goes in an investment bank in a very witty manner which keeps the reader curious about what's gonna happen next. Not a very technical book but has described beautifully what different jargons that goes on a trading floor means. Would recommend anyone who is interested in knowing how it was to work on a trading floor back then. Although things have changed a lot in the last decade with algo trading replacing the conventional traders..