Will I love Liar's Poker?

I didn’t read Liar’s Poker until fairly recently.

I started working for Dow Jones Newswires during the dot-com boom and saw how greed could drive markets. I worked through the housing boom in the Aughts and the financial crisis, and then started covering bitcoin around 2013. So by the time I got to Lewis’s book, I had a good understanding of how people can become obsessed with money.

But Lewis is just such a good writer, and has such insights into how markets work, that a book about bond buyers in the 1980s still feels like it’s about people trading… show more.

Although this book is semi-autobiographical, it is still one of the best financial thrillers for me. I love the build-up of the characters working in the toxic mortgage and junk bond markets of the late 1980s.

I love, too, the way it depicts the moral bankruptcy of the major investment banks and exposes the culture of greed that ultimately led to the financial crash of the late ‘80s, which was to be replicated again many years later.

I love this book because it reads like a fictional tale about the modern financial markets, and yet it’s all absolutely true!

I am still staggered by some of the stories that Lewis tells about the real-life characters who worked on Wall Street back in the 1980s. And I’m in awe of the colorful way he describes and explains the way the bond markets work—no easy task.

Not only did he bring the go-go days of the 80s to life for me, but he also gave me a solid grounding in the machinations of the financial markets, helping me in… show more.

One of the first “tell-all” Wall Street books, this 1989 treasure tells the story of the rise and fall of Solomon Brothers bond trading firm as witnessed from one of its salesmen, Lewis, from the inside.

It is a tale of greed and egos and men with little understanding of the products they sold, let alone scruples to care one way or the other, getting filthy rich in a system that even, at times, rewarded failure and penalized success. It tells how egos ran Solomon, once the most powerful firm in finance, and headed by its venerable CEO John Gutfreund… show more.

The one thing I don’t like about most economics books is that they are overly antiseptic and highly divorced from the machismo gambling culture that drives speculative behavior in the first place and leads to the kinds of conditions that eventually create financial catastrophes.

My writing on economics is highly colored by the fact that I worked on Wall Street as a financial journalist at the height of the high-rolling, cocaine-rich, Salomon Brothers 1980s. But pick any subsequent bubble – Enron, Scion, FTX, the tech founder clients of SVB – it ultimately follows the same betting and bluffing storyline.

If… show more.

This is the book that lifted the lid on Wall St’s roaring eighties. It’s funny, personal, and true to life. It exposes the basic truth in investment banking: the customer comes second. "Who do you work for, this guy or Salomon Brothers?" a shame-faced Lewis is asked by his boss after inadvertently selling a bad bond to an unsuspecting client. It’s a question that every investment banker faces at some time in their career and it’s all laid bare in the book that established a genre.

Before Lewis became a bestselling author of The Big Short and Moneyball, he was an investment banker. If you wish to understand banking culture, the reason why they do seemingly irrational things, or behave in ways that would be reprehensible to the general public, this account of Lewis’ time as a junior banker explains it all in vivid detail. 

It details his rise from a trainee, having food and phones thrown at him on the trading floor, to the banking art of getting a million-dollar bonus and pretending to be unhappy about it.

This is a fun look at what it was like to work at Solomon Brothers in the 1980s. It’s also a great description of trading culture. Liar’s Poker launched Michael Lewis’s career while it took John Gutfreund, who was then CEO of Solomon Brothers, down a few pegs. Solomon Brothers is no more; even huge trading firms get busted.

Lewis is a phenomenal writer. Anything he has written can be assumed to be a great read. Liar’s Poker is Lewis’s account of his experiences as a trainee and bond salesman at Solomon Brothers in the 1980s—A very entertaining and humor-filled narrative.