I suggested we read in March Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, by Michael Lewis, and now I’m sorry I did.
I read it…and it’s a hard book. I write reviews of all the books I read and publish the reviews on my Facebook page, Goodreads, and BookBrowse, if BookBrowse has the book listed, which it doesn’t for “Liar’s Poker.”
Here is my review. Do y’all still want to read this for March? I just want you to know what you’re getting into. On the other hand, if you’re finance types, you might really enjoy it. It has gotten rave reviews for years from professional reviewers and readers–so I’m an outlier.
Liar’s Poker (25th Anniversary Edition): Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street ***
By Michael Lewis
When most of us think of Wall Street, we think of stocks, but in the roller coaster 1980s, it was bonds that actually set the tone and pace for moneymaking on Wall Street. That is the topic of this book.
And it is not an easy book to read. It is an extremely detailed and somewhat convoluted accounting of the financial arcana and complexities of the decade that eventually led to the October 19, 1987 stock market crash as revealed by author Michael Lewis, himself a bond trader with Saloman Brothers.
And while Lewis is an extraordinary writer, this book left me puzzled, confused, and hopelessly lost most of the time. On the other hand, I was an English major and not a finance major so the problem may be with me—not Lewis.
That said, the “people stories” Lewis recounts are fun to read because he tells them with such flair, insight, and humor. Yes, many parts of this book are hilarious.
Lewis, a Southerner at heart, went to Princeton University where he improbably studied art history while everyone else—it was the early 1980s—studied economics with an eye to getting a high-flying job on Wall Street. Lewis still tried to get that high-flying job on Wall Street, much to the amusement and outright laughter of the interviewers. He may have had to take no for an answer, but he didn’t give up. Smart man that he is, he went to England and got a master’s degree from the prestigious London School of Economics.
How he was hired in 1984 at the venerable Salomon Brothers is a story in and of itself involving a royal invitation to St. James Palace, his well-placed dinner partner (the wife of a high-level manager at the firm), the Queen Mother, and a pack of royal corgi dogs. And once he got the job, Lewis showed up on his first day wearing red suspenders with gold dollar signs—a definite fashion no-no. You can’t make this stuff up.
When this book didn’t have me scratching my head and squinting my eyes in a muddle of confusion, it had me laughing out loud. Seriously—it was both.
Lewis’s book is truly an insider’s story of what happened on Wall Street in the 1980s, a time when all you had to be was young, smart, and know how to work a telephone to make millions of dollars, but following Lewis’s accounting of the financial minutia, especially the advent of mortgage bond trading, was quite daunting. What is shocking is how so many customers were exploited just so Salomon Brothers could make millions. It was ruthless. Of course, many of the customers also made a fortune themselves, which is why they kept coming back for more, but not everyone can be a winner. There were plenty of losers, too. Big, big losers.
This is a book about risk-taking that makes Las Vegas look like child’s play—from selling questionable bonds to gullible customers to traders defying company management just to be noticed. Lewis never felt like he fully belonged, and that outsider-looking-in feeling is what allowed him to have the nerve to do what he did. He always assumed he would be fired, calling his job at Salomon his “rent-a-career.” He says this made him fearless, noting “I had the same advantage of recklessness as a driver in a traffic jam with a rent-a-car.”
This is an insider’s tale about a decade of financial history that will likely never be repeated. Well, let’s hope.