21 years after publication, Liar's Poker feels both relevant and ancient. Relevant because it seems the Big Swinging Dicks of Wall Street are ever with us; ancient because of references to things like WATS lines and the lionizing of Salomon Brothers trader John Meriwether, whose Long-Term Capital Management would spectacularly implode in 1998, and Michael Milken, who apparently had not yet been indicted when the book went to press but got a 10-year prison sentence for securities violations.

Lewis is a raconteur more than a documentarian, which is both pleasing and irritating. Certainly raconteurs can sell more books. Most people don't want to read dry scholarly accounts of Wall Street. But there are times in the book (most of chapters 1-4) where his writerly persona is so big that it crowds out everything else. His tone is so arch, snarky, exaggerated, so swimming in eddies of simile and metaphor, that I don't completely believe him (though I'm sure the vague outlines of his story are true). He pairs bravado with disarming self-deprecation, telling us repeatedly how he was utterly green, knew nothing, stumbled his way through everything, yet brought a trader who had wronged him to his knees, and by the time he left Salomon was earning the largest bonus of his class (undeserved, he insists). He steps away from the tales of towel-slapping long enough to give a detailed history of the rise of mortgage trading at Salomon Brothers and how Salomon management allowed hegemony to slip through their fingers. (Raising the question, how did such a junior employee know so much about a) the mortgage market, and b) the internecine battles among Salomon bigwigs?) The portrait he paints of Salomon's chairman John Gutfreund is fairly devastating (though ancient history; Gutfreund would be forced out by Warren Buffett in 1991 after a Treasury bond scandal).

Some examples of his raconteurship:

Ranieri welded a coherent departmental personality out of two separate but equally gamy ethnic groups. (Italians and Jews, if you care.)

Buying whole loans (that is what the traders called home loans, to distinguish them from mortgage bonds) was an act of faith, like eating bologna.

For each step forward in market technology they [the traders:] took a step backward in human evolution...they became louder, ruder, fatter...

Their days began at 8 a.m. with a round of onion cheeseburgers. "We'd order four hundred dollars of Mexican food," says a former trader. "You can't buy four hundred dollars of Mexican food. But we'd try - guacamole in five-gallon drums, for a start. A customer would call in and ask us to bid or offer bonds, and you'd have to say, 'I'm sorry, but we're in the middle of the feeding frenzy. I'll have to call you back.'"

In a previous review, I talked about The Bonfire of the Vanities and about the mastery of Tom Wolfe in crafting his characters, the story line and the various social types he described there. There was one aspect of that book that I did not talk much about and yet which was prevalent in my attraction to the story: not only it is one of the iconic stories that symbolizes Wall Street in the 1980s but it is also taking place at a very specific time when Wall Street was actually part of History. Indeed, Wall Street was at that juncture the mighty knight that was spearheading the victory of capitalism over communist. It was backed by the arrogant success of the money business of these days, that Ronald Reagan and Maggy Thatcher overpowered their arch enemy and delivered the final blow to the crumbling Soviet Union. No moral judgement of good or bad here, just an observation of a given point in history.

I love history and I work in New York, at the core of the world’s financial center. Therefore when Finance becomes part of history, I feel as if I can touch history up close. This is why I was looking for another story in that vein and I found it with the Liar’s Poker.

Like myself, Michael Lewis was writing as an insider and therefore what he writes feels very real. I prefer fiction and therefore I would have liked it more if he had turned the book into a novel but it is nevertheless very good. Lewis describes his experience as bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. This book too is considered iconic of the Wall Street of these days with all the excesses of greed, the ruthless race among competitors to be the first to rip the shirt off each client:

P22 “To succeed on Salomon Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning ‘ready to bite the ass off a bear.’”

Once the wolves were let loose there was no mercy to expect:

P200 “like all of us, he lived by the law of the jungle and the law of the jungle said Geek salesmen are red meat for traders. No exception.”

P208 “the best thing was to pretend to others at Salomon that I had meant to screw the customer. People would respect that. That was called jamming.”

P274 “’Every company has got people sitting around who do nothing for what they get paid’ says Joe Perella. ‘If they take a lot of debt, it forces them to cut fat.’ The takeover specialists did for debt what Ivan Boesky did for greed. Debt is good they said. Debt works.”

In these days, Salomon Brothers’ mortgage department made history because it was successful, obnoxiously, filthily successful at taking advantage of the deregulation by selling big chunks of mortgages like bonds. As a result, individuals that were not particularly polished in the first place to say the least turned into a crowd of grotesque Jabba the Hut who suddenly could leave their shady pubs and have their moment of glory at the top of the world:

P89 “If you fuckin buy this bond in a fucking trade, you’re fucking fucked. And if you don’t pay fuckin attention to the fuckin two-year you get your fuckin face ripped off.”

P214 “The only thing that saved me in meeting after meeting in the early days at Salomon was that the people I dealt with knew even less. London was or is a great refuge for hacks.”

So why would there be an interest for the average reader to dive in this world of slobs and frat boys? Well, why would an honest Roman citizen be interested in a detailed description of a barbarian tribe living somewhere off in the forests of Germany? He wouldn’t except at the very moment of the barbarian invasion when those slobs are about to take over the whole world and impose a new world order and this is exactly what had happened back in the eighties.

These “big swinging dicks” as they called themselves triggered the first business revolution of the post cold war world. They would have a massive impact on the economy. There would be other such revolutions in the new globalized jungle created by ruthless capitalism of course such as the dot-com bubble that I witnessed up close and that I described in my novel “Bubble Boys” and of course the leverage revolution and its subsequent liquidity crisis of 2008.

Each time, the world shook harder, a little like these barbarians who, from invasion to invasion, come every time a little closer to Rome. So what will be the next financial crisis about and what impact will it have on history? Some of the clues are right there, in Michael Lewis’ book. A must read.

Very good book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is has any interest in stocks, investing, wall street, or just the impact of financial policy on the general economy.

Michael Lewis is a great writer, of unique background, who found himself in very exciting circumstances, during very peculiar times. It was written in a very novel way, that varied between first person and third person writing styles, and it still amazes me that everything is based on true historical events.

This book contains a very good historical account of exactly what happened at Salomon brothers in the late 70s and 80s. Lewis Ranieri’s rise and fall, along with mortgage bond market. The precedence of Junk Bonds. The crash of the late 80s. Relationships between a trader and his client, a trader and his rabbis, between members of the same company, or even different companies. This book was extremely educational while maintaining a great sense of excitement and intrigue throughout. There was definitely never a dull moment. I loved reading about the back and from row student’s in the training class as much as I did about John Gutfreund battle with Michael Milken.

Most importantly, this book was not simply a historical regurgitation of various events, nor was it just an individual’s recollection of their time in the company, it was an amalgamation of an insider’s opinion, experience and point of view as he takes you on a journey through one of the most exciting times on Wall Street. Filled with insider rumors and jokes, Michael Lewis is the only man who could’ve written this book, and he wrote it to perfection.

Good storyteller.
Slow beginning with many chapters to give historical context. Still very interesting, and I found myself shaking my head several times. Sometimes also humorous.

Combines great with "Barbarians at the Gate" to show the craziness of the 80s. Both are highly recommended.

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."

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.

Funny and Insightful

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.

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.

I liked it, it was a good journey through what it was like working in the financial industries, mainly in Salomon Brothers in the mid 80s. Basically, obscene amounts of money + people that "if they weren't salesmen would be truck drivers" = debauchery and frat-like behaviour. As some examples, the mortgage trading desk was apparently all fat - they would order $500 worth of mexican food for a couple of people, which as you can imagine is difficult, so included things like 5 gallon tubs of guacamole. The employees would play pranks on each other: for example, just before someone's flight, they would sneakily take his suitcase, take out all the clothes and replace them with paper towels.
On the information front I feel I learned a bunch from "Liar's Poker", mostly about mortgage backed securities and how they work.

I liked Moneyball, and The Big Short is one of my favorite books, but Liar's Poker was disappointing.

Since it is a story about life in an investment bank, I expected Wolf of Wall Street-style parties and debauchery, but none of that happened. In fact, nothing much at all happened in this book, which describes Lewis' brief tenure as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s.

A third of the book is about the training program, another third is about Lewis' year as a "geek" (a junior trader) and the remainder about his final year as a "big swinging d*ck" (a producing trader). The plot is episodic in nature, rather than a narrative with a plot. There are also lengthy sections about the history of the mortgage bond and junk bond markets. These sections were interesting - I didn't know that these markets essentially didn't exist until the 1980s - but they interrupt what little flow the main story has.

Unlike Moneyball, which focuses on Billy Beane, and the Big Short, which focuses on a handful of hedge fund managers, Liar's Poker does not develop any one character. We are introduced to a host of people, but there are no central figures in the story.

On the whole, Lewis provides an interesting look at the inside of an investment bank and some of the history of bond trading, but it paled in comparison to the other books Lewis has written.

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.