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

by Michael Lewis

Overview

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker.

Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393338690
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/15/2010
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	23,457
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

Date of Birth:

October 15, 1960

Place of Birth:

New Orleans, LA

Education:

Princeton University, B.A. in Art History, 1982; London School of Economics, 1985

Table of Contents

Preface 9

1 Liar's Poker 13

2 Never Mention Money 21

3 Learning to Love Your Corporate Culture 39

4 Adult Education 67

5 A Brotherhood of Hoods 99

6 The Fat Men and Their Marvelous Money Machine 129

7 The Salomon Diet 167

8 From Geek to Man 189

9 The Art of War 229

10 How Can We Make You Happier? 255

11 When Bad Things Happen to Rich People 285

Epilogue 307

What People are Saying About This

Tom Wolfe

The funniest book on Wall Street I’ve ever read.

Editorial Reviews

"So memorable and alive . . . one of those rare works that encapsulate and define an era."

Fortune

"The funniest book on Wall Street I’ve ever read."

Tom Wolfe

"Often profane, always hilarious, right on the mark."

People

As described by Lewis, liar's poker is a game played in idle moments by workers on Wall Street, the objective of which is to reward trickery and deceit. With this as a metaphor, Lewis describes his four years with the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers, from his bizarre hiring through the training program to his years as a successful bond trader. Lewis illustrates how economic decisions made at the national level changed securities markets and made bonds the most lucrative game on the Street. His description of the firm's personalities and of the events from 1984 through the crash of October 1987 are vivid and memorable. Readers of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities ( LJ 11/15/87) are likely to enjoy this personal memoir. BOMC and Fortune Book Club selection.-- Joseph Barth, U.S. Military Acad . Lib., West Point, N.Y.

Library Journal

Lewis takes the reader through his schoolboy's progress as trainee and geek in the trading room, to high-powered swashbuckler. The author has a puckish appreciation for the comic. Yet he also has the knack of explaining precisely how complex deals really work. He provides the most readable explanation I've seen anywhere of the origin within Salomon Brothers of the mortgage-backed securities market....It is good history, and a good story.

National Review

Lewis has a gift for the rapid portrait. Unless you find his flippant one-liners irritating, it is a pleasure to be guided around the jungle of bond markets by his reminiscences and trenchant asides. . . . Apart from the belly-laughs, one of the triumphs of Liar's Poker is that it makes the financial complexities of investment banking and the markets accessible to the layman. . . . Everything from yields to selling short is painlessly clarified in the course of the narrative.

Victor Mallet - London Review of Books