Eerie to read the 1980s description of the 2000s financial crisis. Everything old is new again. And Lewis is just an incredible non-fiction writer, weaving anecdotes with explanations.

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.

This was my 7th book by the author and I have loved all his earlier books. Even I was surprised how much I disliked this one.
Unlike the other books, this was a memoir of the author's days from investment banking. Remember U.S. Investment bankers ? The guys who paid themselves fat bonuses after the govt bailout in 2008. The guys who broke every barrier of greed in their insane lust for profits. This is about how one of the biggest investment banking firms "Salomon Brothers" worked in the 1980s.
Somehow, it failed to interest me.

A great book that is easy to read and informative at the same time. Fun and enlightening. The one part that was a bit lacking in my opinion, was the depth of the explanations given to the financial instruments talked about here. It was nice and simple, one gets what the author is talking about, but it didn't quite satisfy my interest in the subject. Otherwise a great piece to understand Wall Street culture during the 80's.

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.

Terrific robin. Mick Lewis has a way of bringing you along for the ride, providing great transparency into the world of bond trading in the 80s. Definitively 5 stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Having had some exposure to the world of finance, I did find this to be an interesting read. "Liar's Poker" brings readers an insight look into the world of banking during the 1980's in which greed, corruption, ego, and shocking excess were omnipresent on Wall Street. The book hinges on Lewis' real world experience in the industry, which certainly adds credibility to the sometimes unbelievable stories he recounts.

The most memorable takeaway was the shocking behavior of "Professionals" within the field, and the toxicity that money culture can create.

I will always be the top fan of "The Big Short" and "Moneyball", but those looking for more Lewis content should pick up "Liar's Poker".

Brilliant. Michael Lewis's first book describes his experiences as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s and it's simultaneously funny, engaging and profound.

Details well the positives, especially the innovators and innovations of the time - e.g. Lewis Ranieri, and collaterised mortgage obligations, and the negatives: the back-stabbing, the hubris, the mismanagement at the highest levels, the obscene salaries, the unethical treatment of clients. All done in a way that is constantly interesting and often funny.

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.

This book surprised me. I read and enjoyed Lewis' Moneyball a while back, and thought I was getting another journalistic account, this time of a crazy moment in corporate culture. Instead, it's very much a memoir of that world. And I didn't care for it at first, since the group of people he writes about are so spectacularly awful. He brings a certain world of investment banking trainees home to you, and I wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the whole book, I don't think I could take it. Something like the way some people don't like The Office (esp. the BBC version); it's too painful to see such human lowness.

But I'm glad I stuck around, because he can really tell a story. The sense of battle, politicking, and putting up fronts. Wry observations. Big picture, little picture. He comes off as a whistle blower with no sense that he's betraying his world; just an inside man dissecting a world he finds amusing, deranged, and perversely fun.

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.

To write a non-fictional portrayal of your life during your 20s is not an easy task. To do this while still in your 20s, to have it be your first book, and to have the story revolve around bond trading / Wall Street - and not have the book be as dry as it sounds - seems an almost cruel undertaking. But Lewis managed to do this. Despite what would seem to be the worst idea for a first book, Lewis keeps the reader interested and turning pages, even with a cast of execrable people that are only made more loathsome by the fact that they do, indeed, exist.

With unwitting prescience, Lewis writes about the creation of the mortgage bond business in the early/mid '80s that would take center stage in 2008 during the global economic meltdown. The unadulterated, unchecked greed with which the bond traders knowingly fleeced "suckers" in the market is staggering not by the reaches of their malfeasance, but rather that those unsavory characters continue to exist, in increasingly more dastardly versions as the years go by, and in all areas of Wall Street, banking and government. I'm happy I read this book after The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine because it makes that more recent book much more poignant in retrospect. I can almost see Lewis' head shaking as he was penning "Big Short" realizing he had seen all of this first hand 20 years before, knowing that nothing would really be done to make meaningful changes to avert a future disaster, and that as this event plays out again and again into the future the reality is that there is going to be a time when the wheels come off for good - and no amount of government intervention or "market self correction" is going to fix the problem. Doomsday Machine, indeed.