Liar's Poker (Norton Paperback)

An interesting tale of life inside a big brokerage house, where the strangest behaviors are normal… if you’re a big swinging dick. It’s a weird dip into a very different life, as the author acknowledges.

It’s half a memoir; the classes and story are told from his perspective, but he takes long asides to explain the politics and organization charts that drive the activity. It sounds like the whole organization underwent a tremendous transformation shortly before he arrived, changing from a partnership with strong controls into a corporation. The older people, who’d worked in the partnership environment, stay decent for a while–out of habit and intertia–but the new kids aren’t locked in as partners, making it much less costly to defect.

A great part of the story was about the beginnings of the residential market and its CMOs. They are kissing cousins to the CDOs that featured so prominently in the 2008 crash… but I never heard of CMOs before this book.

It also demonstrates 2 decades early exactly why the brokerage firms resisted listing prices on an index. Back in the early 80s, the Solomon Brothers middlemen were able to take a huge bite–like 5%–out of mortgage trades where only they knew the prices. That lack of transparency helped drive mortgages from an ignored remnant to 40% of the profit in less than 5 years. But, as soon as their rivals had access to the prices [mostly via defectors], the margins collapsed quickly.

The relations he describes makes the movies about Wall Street sound like documentaries, instead of the wild exaggeration for the screen that I’d hoped. It’s an amazing tale, with corruption at hand at every turn. It’s amazing that he was able to avoid enough of the snares to escape… with a hefty bonus, but without permanently taking on the trader’s worldview.

What’s scary is how many of the very same things played out in the 2008 crisis–also driven by “financialized” versions of mortgages sliced into tranches. It’s crazy how much is familiar…

Anyway, well written, with terrifying foresight baked in.

This is a thoroughly informative account of the author’s experiences as he began his career in Solomon Brothers as a bond salesman until he quit his job. The book is written in a very humorous and sometimes cynical style as he describes the office dynamics, greed and arrogance, and events that unfolded during the 1980s in the bond market. That period is now referred to as the Merger Mania/ Junk Bond Mania which is widely said to be catalyst for the stock market crash in 1987.
The most important part is how the mortgage securities market evolved into becoming the hottest instrument to deal in during those times.

This is probably the best of its kind. It will give you an understanding the various roles within an investment bank and what they do on a daily basis to make money. It is entertaining all throughout and I did not feel like even flipping one page. The story-telling style is captivating. This book is recommended to:
• Anyone who likes to read a good non-fiction book
• Finance and business graduates
• Curious and novice traders
• Anyone interested to know how the market works.

One does not need much specialized and technical knowledge to enjoy this one. Five Stars!

While this book was very well-written and enjoyable to read, it was not nearly as technical as I was hoping. There was some decent information about the beginning of mortgage securitization popularity (covers the funky accounting rules allowing a thrift to temporarily apply current losses to prior year performance) and the role of government sponsored housing entities in guaranteeing certain securities. Also a tidbit on how LBO transactions gained popularity due to the high demand for junk bonds.

I'm not sure what the author's intended message was from his anecdotal epilogue about meritocracy. If he meant nothing more than that not everyone's compensation matches their "contribution to society," then fair enough.

This is a thoroughly informative account of the author’s experiences as he began his career in Solomon Brothers as a bond salesman until he quit his job. The book is written in a very humorous and sometimes cynical style as he describes the office dynamics, greed and arrogance, and events that unfolded during the 1980s in the bond market. That period is now referred to as the Merger Mania/ Junk Bond Mania which is widely said to be catalyst for the stock market crash in 1987.
The most important part is how the mortgage securities market evolved into becoming the hottest instrument to deal in during those times.

This is probably the best of its kind. It will give you an understanding the various roles within an investment bank and what they do on a daily basis to make money. It is entertaining all throughout and I did not feel like even flipping one page. The story-telling style is captivating. This book is recommended to:
• Anyone who likes to read a good non-fiction book
• Finance and business graduates
• Curious and novice traders
• Anyone interested to know how the market works.

One does not need much specialized and technical knowledge to enjoy this one. Five Stars!

This is a thoroughly informative account of the author’s experiences as he began his career in Solomon Brothers as a bond salesman until he quit his job. The book is written in a very humorous and sometimes cynical style as he describes the office dynamics, greed and arrogance, and events that unfolded during the 1980s in the bond market. That period is now referred to as the Merger Mania/ Junk Bond Mania which is widely said to be catalyst for the stock market crash in 1987.
The most important part is how the mortgage securities market evolved into becoming the hottest instrument to deal in during those times.

This is probably the best of its kind. It will give you an understanding the various roles within an investment bank and what they do on a daily basis to make money. It is entertaining all throughout and I did not feel like even flipping one page. The story-telling style is captivating. This book is recommended to:
• Anyone who likes to read a good non-fiction book
• Finance and business graduates
• Curious and novice traders
• Anyone interested to know how the market works.

One does not need much specialized and technical knowledge to enjoy this one. Five Stars!

This is a thoroughly informative account of the author’s experiences as he began his career in Solomon Brothers as a bond salesman until he quit his job. The book is written in a very humorous and sometimes cynical style as he describes the office dynamics, greed and arrogance, and events that unfolded during the 1980s in the bond market. That period is now referred to as the Merger Mania/ Junk Bond Mania which is widely said to be catalyst for the stock market crash in 1987.
The most important part is how the mortgage securities market evolved into becoming the hottest instrument to deal in during those times.

This is probably the best of its kind. It will give you an understanding the various roles within an investment bank and what they do on a daily basis to make money. It is entertaining all throughout and I did not feel like even flipping one page. The story-telling style is captivating. This book is recommended to:
• Anyone who likes to read a good non-fiction book
• Finance and business graduates
• Curious and novice traders
• Anyone interested to know how the market works.

One does not need much specialized and technical knowledge to enjoy this one. Five Stars!

After reading a couple of Lewis' books, I decided to go back and read his first. Liar's Poker is an autobiographical guide to Salomon Brothers in its heyday years. Lewis began his career as a "geek" and worked his way up to a BFSD (you'll have to read the book). It is a book about the greed and arrogance of Wall Street and how they make money by staying just a step ahead of their customer's ignorance. And not just a little bit of money. But in addition, he explains that his customers are also greedy and not much more than gamblers as the markets are pretty much a "zero sum" game.

Selling out of Salomon's internal portfolios gained the salesmen big points and big money. However, even as they were selling those bonds, the salesmen knew that their customers were going to take a hit. They were not allowed to concern themselves with that. They were paid to sell what they were told to sell. Even after reading about it, it is difficult to understand how their customers stayed around. "Burning" customers was how you obtained your "baptism" and moved up in the rankings. Unfortunately for Lewis, he did have some empathy for his customers, but as you will read, I'm not sure whether or not he remembers it as such or actually had any.

Lewis takes us through the boom years and explains the invention of the Mortgage Bond market. You can thank Uncle Sam for making Wall Street billions of dollars -can anyone say Freddie and Fannie? But the greed finally found its mark and Lewis tells of the painful days in 1987 as the firm was dropping equity rapidly with the market.

Additionally, Lewis does nice work on explaining Michael Milken's new wave of corporate takeovers via the Leveraged Buyout. Milken was not indicted as of the writing of this book, and so it is not as easy to see the stretch that the government used to put him away. To me the greed was rampant amongst Corporate America and their senior officers; Milken just gave them a vehicle with which to destroy themselves.

This is an excellent read but a little dated due to the information in it. The writing is decent, but Lewis has gotten better with time.

To be honest, I only read about 30% of the book according to my Kindle - thats all I could handle. That actually says a lot, since I try to finish any book that I start. The first 30% of the book seemed to repeat itself over and over without adding anything useful.

While in the training class, the people in the back of class threw paper wads and spit balls and the people in the front row were seen as brown nosers. The students acted rudely to an instructor. Traders swear a lot and think that they are the most important person in the world. That covers about everything that I read - and it was repeated over and over and over again.

This is a thoroughly informative account of the author’s experiences as he began his career in Solomon Brothers as a bond salesman until he quit his job. The book is written in a very humorous and sometimes cynical style as he describes the office dynamics, greed and arrogance, and events that unfolded during the 1980s in the bond market. That period is now referred to as the Merger Mania/ Junk Bond Mania which is widely said to be catalyst for the stock market crash in 1987.
The most important part is how the mortgage securities market evolved into becoming the hottest instrument to deal in during those times.

This is probably the best of its kind. It will give you an understanding the various roles within an investment bank and what they do on a daily basis to make money. It is entertaining all throughout and I did not feel like even flipping one page. The story-telling style is captivating. This book is recommended to:
• Anyone who likes to read a good non-fiction book
• Finance and business graduates
• Curious and novice traders
• Anyone interested to know how the market works.

One does not need much specialized and technical knowledge to enjoy this one. Five Stars!

This is a thoroughly informative account of the author’s experiences as he began his career in Solomon Brothers as a bond salesman until he quit his job. The book is written in a very humorous and sometimes cynical style as he describes the office dynamics, greed and arrogance, and events that unfolded during the 1980s in the bond market. That period is now referred to as the Merger Mania/ Junk Bond Mania which is widely said to be catalyst for the stock market crash in 1987.
The most important part is how the mortgage securities market evolved into becoming the hottest instrument to deal in during those times.

This is probably the best of its kind. It will give you an understanding the various roles within an investment bank and what they do on a daily basis to make money. It is entertaining all throughout and I did not feel like even flipping one page. The story-telling style is captivating. This book is recommended to:
• Anyone who likes to read a good non-fiction book
• Finance and business graduates
• Curious and novice traders
• Anyone interested to know how the market works.

One does not need much specialized and technical knowledge to enjoy this one. Five Stars!

In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis chronicles his time as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. It starts off with how he ended up in the investment banking industry, and then continues by describing the training program at Salomon Brothers. In the middle, there is a fairly lengthy description of the mortgage trading department at Salomon and its main players. The last part is about Michael Lewis brief career as a bond salesman in London.

Lewis is a very gifted writer, and the book is quite funny, especially the first part about the training program. I laughed out aloud several times when reading it. The middle part drags on a bit, but was nevertheless interesting. The best part was reading about the sales tactics and the lack of scruples when selling bonds. I also learned quite a bit about bond trading, and the development that occurred in the 1980s, both with mortgage bonds and junk bonds. It also describes the scheming and back-stabbing at the firm really well.

In all, an easy read – well-written, funny and informative about the world of bonds and investment banking in the 1980s.

Many authorshave tried but none have succeeded in writing another 'Liar's Poker." Simply put, this is a must-read for anyone interested in or just fascinated by Wall Street. Michael Lewis, in the introduction to one of his more recent books (I think it was "the Big Short," wrote that he was horrified that people saw it as a guide to getting ahead in investment banking. He meant it as a cautionary tale.
Whatever your motivation, it's a great window into a seminal moment in financial markets. The characters - John Gutfreund, John Meriwether, Louie Ranieri, and "the human piranha" - are larger-than-life. It's hard to imagine today's more corporate, sanitized Wall Street having a cast of characters anything as colorful. A great, entertaining read, whether or not you're interested in finance or not.

Very funny in places, self deprecating and gives you a real feel for what stock brokers think of their "customers". They have no problem making them broker if it furthers their own careers. I used to dabble in Mister Market - won some, lost some. It takes time and focus to win and don't ever believe the crap you get in the mail telling you they'll make you rich and you only have to spend 20 minutes a day paying attention. Lies, all lies. This book is an interesting inside look at how the Market works and yes, it does run on rumor and over-wrought wishfull thinking . . . .

Reading this book in the aftermath of the financial collapse is super interesting. This book starts off by talking about the actual game called Liar's poker that the super rich would play on wall street. It's basically a game of randomness and bluffing used with dollar bills. The story talks about Salomon brothers and some of the personalities that were working in the rise of the investment banking industry in the 90's.
The story vacillates back and forth between first person narrative and overall look at the bigger wall street picture and how mortgage and junk bonds became such popular investment vehicles. I found this book super interesting because of the interest early in my life to work on Wall Street. Other factors steered me away from pursuing that career, but this book is great for those wanting to learn about wall street in the 90's.

What do you get when you combine greed, a bunch of smart guys, and an opaque bond market? Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. Michael Lewis chronicles his early days as a trainee and then salesman in London for Salomon Brothers. What he depicts makes for very entertaining/informative reading and provides an insider's view of what actually occurred in the brokerage business during the 1980s.

Liar's Poker refers to a game in which people would take a dollar and claim to have a certain set of numbers as the serial number on their bill. The other participants either continued the process or called their bluff. This game used similar tactics and skills to traders when making trades in the market so was very popular.

It was a testosterone fueled environment focused on one thing, making money pour out of phones. Lewis and his fellow salespeople/traders made millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers selling bonds to investors/speculators. The customer frequently got the short end of the stick as still happens today in the individual bond market. Because of the lack of transparency in bond pricing, usually only brokers know what the actual ask/bid price is and so take advantage of individual investors. Many times the salesmen, then as now, had no real concept of what they were selling but were instructed to jam bonds down customers throats to move product.

A good portion of the book describes the invention of the mortgage bond market inside of Salomon Brothers. This led to the products which caused much of the crisis in 2008.

Towards the end of the events in the book, Lewis seems to grow a bit of a conscience and stops intentionally selling customers products he believes are bad. He grows disenfranchised with the market and Salomon Brothers deception and quits after making $225,000 as a 27 year old kid 2 years out of the training program.

While it probably quite accurately describes the environment, one negative part of the book is the frequent use of profanity, especially the F-bomb.

This book is good for anyone wanting an entertaining and eye opening account of what really goes on in most Wall Street companies. If it creates in you a desire to know what actually matters as an investor instead of what a salesman tells you, I highly recommend The Investment Answer by Daniel Goldie & Gordon Murray.

Michael Lewis worked at Salomon Brothers from December 1985 to February 1988, first as a bond trainee and then as a bond salesman, during the epicenter of one of those events that define an age. Never before had so many young adults made so much money in so little time as did the traders at Salomon Brothers in the late 1980s. Liars Poker is his book about life in the epicenter.

Salomon Brothers had been the leading bond house among investment banks before the 1980s, but it was Paul Volcker's announcement on 0ct 6, 1979--as the newly-named chairman of the Federal Reserve--that began the golden age of the bond market. Volcker decreed that money supply would be fixed, and interest rates would float. Big changes in interest rates would mean big changes in bond prices. Those who valued bonds properly--as Salomon did--stood to make big profits.

The number of bonds issued during the 1980s exploded. Early in the decade, the American government had to increase its borrowing to finance its large deficit. As luck would have it, an unrelated event allowed these bonds to be financed fairly easily. Socialist Francois Mitterand of France nationalized several big banks and insurance companies when he took office. Owners were paid amounts that they deemed unsatisfactory. Such policy reminded investors that there were factions in nearly every Western European country who could come to power and seize property through parliamentary means. Huge amounts of capital flowed into the United States, where the risks of confiscatory government were considered small.

In 1970, investment banks figured out how to securitize mortgages, and a decade later, Salomon figured out how to sell them to investors. Yet Salomon missed out on the explosion of speculative-grade debt, which not only cut into its profits but made the entire company susceptible to corporate raiders using junk bonds to take it over.

Michael Lewis focused on the personalities at Salomon Brothers, making Liar's Poker read more like a novel than a financial history. Many of the names were changed to protect the guilty, although it was not possible to change the names of certain Salomon executives. It's easy to emphasize the gluttony of the mortgage backed traders as an example of Wall Street excesses, but it was really market inefficiencies that allowed these people to make so much money. They were just doing their job, and trying to deal with the demands of their jobs.

While Wall Street profits defined the age of the 1980s, the crash of October 19, 1987, was probably the most newsworthy financial event of the decade. It was the first crash of such magnitude since 1929, and it galvanized public reaction. Since then, we have had similar-sized market adjustments, and these types of fluctuations cause less consternation to the public. The crash of 1987 is best-known for the blame placed on computerized institutional program trading of stocks arbitraged with indexes. New legislation was approved shortly afterwards to add special handling rules to computerized institutional orders if the Dow Jones Industrial Index moved by 2%. Circuit breakers were added to shut down trading if the Dow Jones dropped by 10% in a day.

The crash of 1987 prompted regulators to resolve the insider trading scandals in 1986 and 1987 involving Ivan Boesky and Dennis Levine at Drexell Burnham Lambert. A series of amendments were passed in 1988 to the SEC Act of 1934, which made the trading of junk bonds on insider information illegal. The definition of insiders was widened, and tippers were made liable for damages as well as those who received the tips. While Lewis claims that Drexell did not technically break the law, that statement is nebulous. The SEC Amendments only further defined what everyone knew was wrong in the first place, and it added more teeth to efforts of the SEC to obtain justice.

This book, and Bonfire of the Vanities, are considered two of the most enjoyable-to-read books about the Wall Street scene of the Go-Go 1980s.

As an advertising sales representative for The Wall Street Journal, in the Financial Advertising Department at the time this story is written, I really enjoyed the insider's perspective of the investment banking business. Although I didn't handle the Salomon Brothers account, I called on Shearson/Lehman Brothers, First Boston and a few of the others. The reverie and the heady money making that occurred, overflowed into the advertising business and brought me back to the days when the "American Dream" was still alive. I couldn't wait to turn to the page where I knew the October crash would be described. The ticker tape was still alive that day, and my boss was flying back and forth across the office watching it as "programmed trading" brought the stock, equities and bond markets to a screaming halt. Michael Lewis is a gifted writer with a talent for bringing vision with words.

Liar's Poker is Michael Lewis' memoir of his days as a bond salesman on Wallstreet at Salomon Brothers, time that coincides with some very eventful moments for both the firm and Wallstreet. Lewis' superbly chronicles those events with a hefty dose of sly humor and amusing anecdotes.

The book highlights some of the inherent conflicts of interest that plague broker-investor relationships, and the inner workings of the financial system. Throughout the book, Lewis provides brilliantly simple explanations of some of Wallstreets' most common securities on terms any layman can grasp.

He depicts his bond broker colleagues as highly motivated, smart and greedy salesmen with little in the way of scruples, morality or decency, and nothing but their personal gain on their agendas... although he ultimately claims virtue for himself.

The markets' sole rule of engagement: Caveat emptor (Buyer beware)

"I could tell when Dash was about to sell a few hundred million dollars of government bonds because his torso would jackknife in his chair so that his chest was almost in his lap and his head went into the sound booth. Just before consummating the trade, he'd plug his empty ear with a finger on his free hand and speak rapidly in a low voice. (One of his customers nicknamed him the Whispering Dash.) Then suddenly he'd pop up, hit the silencer button on his receiver, and shout into the hoot, "Hey, New York... New York... you're done on October ninety-two to September ninety-threes, one hundred by one hundred ten... yeah, one hundred million by one hundred ten million." (p. 221)

It's that kind of salivation that Lewis generates with his page-turning, compelling descriptions of life as a Wall Street trader in the 1980s. Although published back in 1989, it was insanely prescient and reads like a current analysis (and forecast) of the economic crisis. He describes the origins of Collateralized Debt Obligations--the mortgage instruments behind the 2008 market crash and global economic meltdown, from which recovery has sucked, and only dipped again in 2011. Finally, Lewis has such witty prose, he includes a quote from former governor Edwin Edwards, "hell's hottest fires burn for hypocrites." To Lewis's credit, what makes his writing so personal is how confessional and honest he is about his own shortcomings.

Like when he describes a hapless newbie on the trading floor. "Someone bumped into him and sharply told him to watch his step." But then after sympathizing, Lewis admits falling to what had initially appalled him about the life as a trader: "Then I thought a nasty thought. A terrible thought. A truly unforgivable thought. But it showed I was coming along. What a wimp, I thought. He doesn't have a #@%*ing clue." (p. 66) By the end, however, Lewis also admits to the folly of the whole enterprise, however, including what he fell for--by describing his father's philosophy that "people who made a lot of money were neat. Horatio Alger and all that. It took watching his son being paid 225 grand at the age of twenty-seven, after two years on the job, to share his faith in money. He has only recently recovered from the shock. I haven't."

Lewis goes on to conclude, "When you sit, as I did, at the center of what has been possibly the most absurd money game ever and benefit out of all proportion to your value to society (as much as I'd like to think I got only what I deserved, I don't), when hundreds of equally undeserving people around you are all raking it in faster than they can count it, what happens to the money belief? ... Without that belief, I lost the need to make huge sums of money. They funny thing is that I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished." (p. 308) I get irritated at his fever pitch descriptions of the fast and furious money-earning life, including in The Big Short, an equally impressive and fast read. But that probably says more about my inner conflicts than any flaw in Lewis.

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs marketed and sold $40 billion in mortgage backed securities to its customers while secretly betting against them. 20 years prior, Mr. Lewis wrote about similar conflicts of interest between Salomon Brothers and its customers. With a few market crashes in between, no meaningful regulation has been implemented to prevent such breaches of trust. So once again, we learn from history that we do not learn anything from history. From page 222 of the hardcopy: "If it was a good deal, the bankers kept it for themselves; if it was a bad deal, they'd try to sell it to their customers."

Henry Kaufman, the head of bond research at Salomon in the 1980s wrote in the "Institutional Investor": "... freeing the financial system, putting into being financial entrepreneurship and not putting into being adequate disciplines and safeguards." That was true then as it is now.

Liar's Poker is the story of Wall Street excesses, where nothing seems to matter as much as lining up your pockets at the expense of fools, and Mr. Lewis lived the experience and told it magnificently. I'm not a fan of any particular author, but surprisingly, I find myself reading one book after another of Mr. Lewis'. He seems to have a talent for simplifying complicated concepts and events, and weaving it into an entertaining narrative from cover to cover. Mr. Lewis can write a bestselling phone book.

Michael Lewis, with his amazing humor and brilliance, has a way of helping one understand the workings of Wall Street at a time when one of the most influential investment banks, Solomon Brothers, eventually failed in a swirl of scandal. Michael Lewis, having worked at Solomon's, offers a clear view of how despicable the traders on the floor behaved as a means toward producing more wealth for themselves without a care in the world for their clients. It seems that Michael Lewis is probably the only person who worked on Wall Street who has honestly revealed what it was like to be a trader and talk about it with eloquence and his own special humor. Even if you have little interest in the workings of Wall Street, this book will certainly ignite an interest you thought you didn't have. And, by the way, the actual game of Liar's Poker is beyond belief.

This book gave an exceptional review of the Bond Market in the 1980's ending with the stock market crash in 1987, and the attempted hostile takeover of Solomon Brothers. This is the fifth book of Michael Lewis I've read and he delivered a great story once again.

This story certainly filled in some gaps in my knowledge of the 1980's economic scene. Discovering this book after I completed "The Big Short" made it difficult to believe the existence of the U.S. bond market for mortgages is younger than I am. As always it is difficult to go back and read an author's prior works, as they always seem choppy and most author's get better over time, but Lewis did a great job here for his first foray into a complicated subject for a novel.

With all the consolidation that occurred in the banking and financial industry post 2008 market crash, I still have trouble figuring out which companies have merged with other companies in the 20 years since this book was written.
Once again after reading the inside scoop of on bond salesmen, I'm more assured that anyone managing your money but you is a big mistake. Also, Lewis makes it clear that all a salesman wants to do is push you a sale, whether it works out for you or not, their loyalty is to their commission, and to the firm long before their customers. Parts of the book were dry, but what can you expect from a book about bonds.

I'm very excited to read Boomerang when it comes out in October of 2011, and if nothing else I learned how to play the game liar's poker. Lewis explains the rules on first four pages of the book, but once you get that far he draws you into the rest.

Can this book really be 20 years old?

I found a copy while visiting and have read it again -- still as hilarious as I remember, but in hindsight it seems even more on target.

Visiting a Geneva money manager who handled a mere $86 million, he was told the manager had dealt with 285 different investment banks in the last year.

"And they are all the same," said the manager. So much for the importance of keeping the too-big-to-fail global institutions intact.

"In other words, the whole idea of globalization was a canard. The brave new world of advanced communications and a single worldwide market for capital did not necessarily imply that a small handful of investment banks such as Salomon would dominate the world. It meant that money bounced more freely around the globe. But there didn't seem to be the same economies of scale in handling that money as in, say, frozen green beans."

And this was, as I noted, 20 years ago.

Lewis also has the launch of mortgage-backed securities. government guarantees -- Ginnie Mae before Freddie and Fannie -- and an S&L bailout that allowed the home lenders to deduct current losses against taxes paid in the previous 10 years.

It's kinda like the $33 billion tax break that US homebuilders recently received from Congress, as reported byGretchen Morgenson in the New York Times.

"ON Nov. 6, President Obama signed the Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009 into law, extending unemployment benefits by 20 weeks and renewing the first-time homebuyer tax credit until next April.

"But tucked inside the law was another prize: a tax break that lets big companies offset losses incurred in 2008 and 2009 against profits booked as far back as 2004. The tax cuts will generate corporate refunds or relief worth about $33 billion, according to an administration estimate."

She added:

"Before the bill became law, the so-called look-back on losses was limited to small businesses and could be used to counterbalance just two years of profits. Now the profit offset goes back five years, and the law allows big companies to take advantage of it, too."

Good value for lobbying dollars. Major homebuilders spent $200,000 or so each on lobbying for the tax change and expect to make $200 million to $450 million. from the change in law.

It is always a delight to watch the free market in action. More details in Liar's Poker about how far back this goes in the mortgage business.

This is an absolute investment book classic. The setting is 1980s Wall Street. The world has changed a lot since the book was originally written but this work is full of amusing anecdotes and stories about working for a large brokerage firm. The author chronicles his experiences training and working on Wall Street. If you are looking for specific tips or investment strategy then it is safe to give this one a pass because you won't learn much in the way of practical information. It's simply a glimpse into the behind the scenes world of high finance. Parts of the book are laugh out loud funny and the stories may stay with you for years. I read this before I graduated, started working for a bank and eventually opened my own business. If you don't work in finance you might appreciate this as a tale similar to Art of the Deal.

Buy this book if you work in finance or are considering it as a career!

Liar's Poker is a game involving deceit, skill, and luck. "Liar's Poker," the book, is a much more interesting topic. Lewis was a Soloman Brothers bond salesman working mostly in London. The book's intent is to describe and explain events and attitudes of the 1986-era.

Wall Street was the "in thing" in the mid-1980s. Forty-percent of Yale's 1986 graduating class (1,300) applied to just a single bank - First Boston. Lewis graduated a few years earlier from Princeton (art history) and had just finished graduate studies at the London School of Economics when he was selected out of 6,000 applicants for one of 127 trainee positions at $48,000; fellow classmates included ten Harvard MBAs, 70 other MBAs, and 15 PhDs. Lewis' account of his training offers no lessons.

Soloman had a near monopoly on bond trading at the time, and by 1980 the mortgage market exceeded the U.S stock market. Soloman's mortgage bond trading made more in 1985 than the rest of Wall Street. The resulting giddy profits allowed employees to get away with incredible rowdy, boorish behavior.

An early major problem with mortgage bond trading was pension funds and foreign buyers' reluctance to get involved with instruments that could be paid off at any time. CMOs and tranches, introduced in 1983, resolved this problem - allowing buyers to select both the maturity period and risk desired. Eg. a first tranche contained maturities of 5 or less years, 2nd 7-15 years, 3rd 15-30 years.

After training, Lewis was sent to London and assigned to cold calling. Some Soloman traders would take advantage of customers and unload dogs that the firm was holding and couldn't get rid of; sometimes this bankrupted the customer or got the individual buyer fired. Lewis quickly learned better approaches - arbitrage, contrarian thinking, and exploiting secondary impacts (eg. buy oil after Chernobyl).

Another ethics problem Lewis encountered was a manager that claimed credit for one of Lewis' innovative sales. The "good news" was learning how Lewis cleverly obtained revenge.

Expense accounts for Lewis and his associates were unbelievable - $400/night for a hotel (almost 20-years later I was limited to $50). Lewis himself earned $90,000 his second year - half bonus.

Eventually Soloman's low ethics, free-spending, high charges, and the hundreds of alternative firms almost led to the London unit's demise. (The market was much more of an oligarchy in the U.S.) Regardless, the firm's bad decisions (eg. temporarily getting out of mortgages) and penny-pinching bonuses led to a serious brain drain.

The most interesting portion of the book is Lewis' knowledge of Michael Milken. Milken saw bonds from blue-chip companies as risky - little upside, lots of downside. (This was the era when American manufacturing was collapsing.) Small new companies and large old companies with problems could not persuade risk-averse commercial bankers and money managers to lend to them. Milken, however, analyzed the data and realized these risk premiums were excessive.

Soloman tried to get into the junk bond market, but was undercut by a top managers of its resuscitated mortgage bond unit who followed the junk-bond presenters around and undermined them. (Lack of top leadership?) The number of new junk bonds rose from nearly 0 in the 1970s to $839 million in 1981, and $12 billion in 1987 - 25% of the corporate bond market. The market further expanded by using junk bonds to finance raids on undervalued corporations, then for LBOs and M&A. Drexel Burnham (Milken's firm) netter fees of $100+ million for single takeovers. Soloman, however, misses out.

Lewis left, and shortly afterwards Buffett rescued the firm via a $700 million convertible preferred investment. A 1991 scandal involving government bonds led to Buffett taking over as CEO for ten months, and in 1997 the firm was sold to Citigroup.

A very good and very well-written book by a guy who was in a very interesting place at a very interesting time. What Lewis does very well is explain complex situations - major financial trends, macro-economics, wall street politics, the psychology of sociopaths, avarice and greed - in a very compelling and easy-to-understand way. He talks about how the US Federal Reserve Bank created a situation for mortgage bonds to blossom, and how the Salomon Brothers were the first investment bank to start a mortgage bonds desk, how they had a monopoly on the product for many years before their greed caused them to leak valuable staff. It's not covered in the book, but Salomon is now gone, absorbed by Citi, which has gone through its troubles as well - there's no way the old Salomon could still be intact, having gone from a partnership to a listed company with its strange culture and weird bureaucracy. Nice stuff.

This book helped me to actually understand wall street better than any experience in the past. (And that's saying a lot since I used to work for a firm which audited some of those firms, have had many friends on WS, etc.). Notice I didn't say this book helped me to understand stocks, bonds, markets, or investing though - just wall street and it's culture.

From the outlandish behavior, over the top pranks, abuse of newcomers, and obsession with money, Michael Lewis describes the culture of Wall Street in a way that will feel oddly familiar because you understand the archetype, even if you've never been there.

One of the best parts of the book is the history it gives. Lewis described the creation of thinks like mortgage backed securities and America's infatuation with junk bonds. He chronicles how the market crashes in the 80s affected Salomon brothers, and the forces that led to it. What he couldn't have known at the time of course was the havoc that mortgage backed securities would lead to decades later, but he explains how they came to exist, sets the stage, and leaves you with a better appreciation for the origins of our current economic troubles. Even though this book doesn't talk directly about our current economic problems (because it was published in 1989), it gives a better understanding of the root causes (the culture, the incentives, the short term thinking, etc.) than many other books I've read. It also has the advantage of not suffering from revisionism due to hindsight - for example many of the benefits of mortgage backed securities are mentioned. In my opinion, this is a much fairer and better look at wall street than almost anything else I've seen.

If you are looking to work in a wall st firm then I would strongly recommend finishing this book before your first day. I have worked in an investment bank for 4 years and I really wish I had read this book earlier on. There is a lot this book covers that it not true any more but there is so much that is still relevant in an investment bank.

Overall, I didn't like the way the book was structured. It started with Michael's personal story about how he got a job on wall st and the training program...then suddenly the book started talking about big shots of Solomon Brothers. Michael's story just disappeared all of a sudden only to appear towards the end.

I think it should have been a more personal account of his time at Solomon with some background info about other characters.

I read this year's ago when it first was published. I read it again now while researching the 2008 credit crisis. This book should be required reading for the President, every senior finance related administration official and every member of Congress every two or three years.

While this book reveals unseemly practices on Wall Street, one can also conclude that government agencies and politicians failed to be the honest referees who might have prevented the unseemly practices in the first place. If politicians routinely read this book, they might more faithfully act in their role to protect and balance the interests of the nation as a whole.

This is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn what investment banking is all about. It goes over all aspects of the business from the perspective of Michael Lewis' time as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980's. He covers the explosive growth and vast wealth accumulated by those in this business, and the subsequent market crash of 1987.

The book was published in 1989 and provided a haunting cautionary tale for Wall Street; one that largely went unnoticed all the way to the financial "awakening" of everyone who had a bank account in 2008.

Lewis manages to shock you with accounts of the vast amount of money earned by 20-something's at investment banks in this time frame. He also points out the ridiculousness of greed-filtered "fairness" in the sense that these yong people weren't even fairly compensated relative to the money they brought the firm.

Despite the "fairness" of compensation, Lewis eventually comes to grips with his own conscious and, following his father's belief, decides that his true worth/value should be determined by the positive impact he has in society, not by the questionable tactics designed to exploit gains from the movement of vast amounts of money. Ultimately, he concludes that not anyone at these firms creates the value they are compensated for.

Despite the opportunity to earn millions had he kept a career in investment banking (even after the crash), Lewis chooses to leave the Wall Street life. You get the sense that he still has a latent sense of regret for the money he walked away from (a testament to the blinding power of greed), but that he made the right decision in the end.

Liar's Poker offers a refreshing, amusing, and deeply cynical look at the investment banking world of the early 1980's, when Masters of the Universe lorded over all they surveyed (in their own minds anyway).

This book was one of the earliest to roll back the i-banker canopy of secrecy and respectability, revealing Wall Street at its heart... a bunch of thuggish suits with varying levels of pedigree, endlessly looking for new and creative ways to mug their clients. Though the book is old, the flavor and rhythms are timeless. Some of the criticism is fair, some of it unfair... yet many years later, it's the same old Street.

Because Lewis writes dispassionately and objectively, his words hit home all the more. He comes across as a excellent story teller, not much more or less. (This seems to be the way he wants it.)

In my earlier days of getting acquainted with markets, I often wondered how investment banks could hire rooms full of "traders" and have most of those traders be profitable. If trading requires a special talent or mindset, which it definitely seems to, how is it that all these ivy league guys can be good at trading en masse, especially when they have zero patience and huge egos?

Based on the Liar's Poker picture, the answer is that most of the "traders" in the employ of large investment banks are not trading in the true sense of the word. They are either siphoning money from unwitting customers with the help of product-pushing salesmen (no different than run of the mill brokers, except higher class), or else they are taking a bite out of the bid/ask spread, which is what many floor traders do. In exchange for providing liquidity, floor traders act as slippage extractors of a sort; the `skid' you see between order price and fill price is what goes in their pocket. This type of thing is more about exploiting a structural advantage, and less about competition with other traders.

Surprisingly, Michael Milken was one of the few who came out of this book looking like a winner. The rest of the world wrote Milken off as a crook without actually looking into what he did or how he made a fortune. Lewis gives a clear and lucid explanation of Milken's big idea--that the investment world as a whole had its credit rating apparatus backwards, due to a skewed perspective of corporate credit risk. The book recalls in some detail how Milken was able to leverage this single idea, with a sheer force of will, into billions of dollars in junk bond profits.

As a side note, even after reading Den of Thieves (an excellent book that chronicles Milken's ultimate fall), I still wonder if he got the short end of the stick--painted as a crook because he was exceptionally greedy and made obscene amounts of money, rather than any truly grievous wrongdoing. The massive contribution Milken made to the capital markets was to reshape the assessment of credit overall, increasing the efficiency of capital deployment across the globe. This surely gives him claim to a better reputation than the one he's gotten from the press thus far.

If you read this book and enjoy it, you might want to note that a 1990's successor to Liar's Poker is Fiasco: Blood in the water on Wall Street, written by another bond insider whose moral qualms eventually force him off the Street.

This is the true story of a former Salomon Bros. bond saleman during the free wheeling mid 80's when they ruled the roost until their abrupt collapse.
Much of the book is both hilarious and cautionary--and often for the same reason. The excesses of the cut throat and weird culture at Salomon and their "screw the customer" mantra (and action) if it conflicted with Salomon's perceived interests yield a not often seen inside view of the goings on. I should also point out here that the customers were wealthy individuals and institutions. A customer with 20 million dollars to deal with (in the mid-80's) was small potatoes. In fact, they were the ones that Salomon let loose their fledging traders on (this was a learn on the job job), since it wasn't considered of very great import if they "blew them up", i.e., caused them to lose most of their money.
Any business book that's actually readable stands out. And this one more than most. It's not only readable but quite cynically humorous. Since many of the reviews describe the very positive qualities of the book, let me mention some of its deficiencies, as I saw them.
First, the author underplays his abilities. While directly depicting himself as not very good at his career, in fact it's quite clear he was an excellent salesman. This isn't so important in itself, but it is represents a tone in the book that to me indicates that the author was more into it and the Salomon culture than he writes and from which he tries to ethically distance himself.
Additionally, most of the individuals (and the corporate culture) were so extreme that I would have liked to know what they were like and the lives they led away from work. One thing I would definitely be curious about is to what extent their cut throat and sleazy work behavior carried over into their personal lives. Were they solid pillars of the community (many of them were more than wealthy) or were they as much sleaze bags off the camera as well as on. Or, since it would probably be a mixed bag, how did they divide in general along these lines.
This is one respect in which I think Tracy Kidder's _Soul of a New Machine_ is better, in addtion to Kidder's more natural language flow.
But, I don't mean to appear negative. I really enjoyed the read, again finding it both amusing and cautionary.
While reading it I remembered what a friend of mine who married wealth ("I married her only for her money," he confessed to me as she stood beside him) and then increased it. I had visited him in the early 80's. "If you ever need a bond salesman call Mr. X. He's completely honest." His wife seriously nodded in agreement.
I, obviously naive, thought this a curuous remark. Why wouldn't he be honest? In general. But also when he depends on your repeat business.
My friend was right, and this book will show you why.

Not a card game at all but a game of bluff and sizing up your opponent. It is very appropriate that the book starts off with the example of John Gutfreund (CEO of Salomon) trying to engage his chief bond trader in a single round of Liars Poker for 1 million dollars, because it is symptomatic of the egos of the players, the money that was being made and the excesses that characterised what is now generally called the greed decade.
Lewis's perspective is that of an insider as he was a bond trader for Salomon Brothers in their New York and London offices. It's generally a very funny story with some hilarious descriptions of some of the characters and their behavior. Hilarious that is, until you realise that damage was being done to lives, companies and industries. As the author so succintly put it "the range of acceptable conduct...was wide indeed.It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people's behavior into a socially acceptable pattern...this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive." That this was true he goes on to illustrate with stories about trades gone bad, deals losing millions, and people skewered for things they had no knowledge of. I guess you could say that this was Darwinian Capitalism, these people had evolved into predators and were at the top of the food chain. Lewis himself says as much "the place was governed by the simple understanding that the unbridled pursuit of perceived self-interest was healthy. Eat or be eaten." It is no coincidence that one of his colleagues was called the Human Piranha!. Naturally, behaviour like this will lead to a messy ending and so it is, with the story culminating with a description of the Stock Market crash of '87 and Salomon itself in trouble.
I read this book at about the same time as 'Den of Thieves' and would recommend both (that is, if you are interested in a historical view of Wall Street; remember these events took place 10-15 years ago). Liars Poker is good for the witty personal perspective Lewis brings, the other book gives a broader view of Wall Street and an investigative journalistic perspective of the insider trading scandal involving Michael Milken et al.

...
In short, reading Michael Lewis' account of his tumultuous two-year stint at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980s delivers all the pleasure and enjoyment of reading good pulp fiction. Lewis is -- much to my surprise, I must admit -- an extremely talented writer with a gift for metaphor and the art of character description and analysis.
One of the endearing things about this book, I think, is that it is laced with a certain self-deprecating tone. Lewis' basic thesis (although I don't think he really believes it) is that the the most glaring sign of Salomon's impending demise was that it started hiring people such as himself. Despite many self-effacing comments, however, Lewis points out repeatedly that he was the highest paid -- and thus best producing -- young bond salesman at Salomon during his tenure and seeks to assure the reader that he isn't some scorned ex-employee who couldn't hack the perils of life on the trading floor.
Lewis dedicates a few chapters to explaining the rise of the mortgage trading desk at Salomon and the junk bond market under Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham, although neither have much to do with Lewis' career as a government bond salesman in Salomon's London Office. Did the author think this gave proper perspective and background to the telling of his personal story or was it an effort to pad out an already short piece of work? Probably a bit of both, is my guess.
In sum, if you approach this book (as I did) as a roman a clef, with all the exaggerations and artistic license associated with fiction, rather than a legitimate memoir, you'll probably get a lot more enjoyment out of it. It is funny, fast-paced, often incredible -- and will quickly expunge any thoughts you once had of being an investment banker, no matter how high the salaries might be.

Liar's Poker is one of the most insightful accounts of the investment banking world that one could read about without being an insider. It is in most respects a brutal story about the ruthlessness and total lack lf scruples that govern the world of high stakes finance but nevertheless an insightful account for the consequences of the explosive surge in bond markets from 323 billion at the end of the 70ies to 7 trillion by mid 80ies, following the FED's decision in late 1979 to let the rates float. With uncanny precision, methodical approach, and copious amounts of humor, Michael Lewis takes us on an insider tour de force of the investment banking business as embodied in the Salomon Brothers, Lewis' employer between 1985-87, during their time of fame and what made that company great, or shall we say notorious. Salomon greatly capitalized on the golden opportunities in bond markets starting with mortgage bonds, going through all related exotic instruments and derivatives, and ending with the junk bonds. Greed, ambition, and deceit were ranked top priorities at all organizational levels and duping the clients for corporate gains was the norm to attain success, recognition, fat bonuses, and promotions. Last but not least every was in pursuit of the much coveted title of Big Swinging Dick (women qualified for that title too) and even the occasional Balls of Brass title, the culmination of all deceitful selling techniques to uninformed/disinformed investors (read victims). The portraits of the Salomon high rollers are scary but at the same time comical; John Gutfreund, the CEO of Salomon, Lewie Ranieri, the mortgage bond superhero, who started from the bottom, in the mailroom and made it to be the top Swinging Dick (for a very short period though...nobody lasted too long), Michael Milken of Drexel Investments, their sworn enemy, all of them are unforgettable. Michael Lewis writes with insight and chilling realism. He cuts deep into what the deal is all about without fear of exposing the dirty, even illegal side of the business he was part of during the mid eighties, including his own role in ripping the naive investors off as a senior bond salesman.
Overall great reading; witty, sarcastic, satirical and captivating from start to finish. The reading is easier if you understand finance, especially bond pricing and bond market mechanics, otherwise it may become a little cumbersome. Liar's Poker particularly makes great reading for all Wall Street aspiring candidates, it's good to be prepared, you seldon know what awaits around the corner...

This is a great book. A home run. While I am not an industry insider, I did read it while I was getting an MBA from the Michigan Business School and enjoyed it a great deal. It provided a great deal of background to what I was learning in various finance classes. Mr. Lewis helped me see the people who make these markets work and move and that it isn't faceless formulas free of emotion finding perfect prices; rather it is ambitious men (and women) ferociously and sometimes crazily pursuing their own financial interests.
The book is amazingly funny without being slapstick. There are some amazing images - not only the Meriwether games of Liar's Poker, but the food being delivered to the physically rotund mortgage bond traders, the bond trader who felt like the price would rise and then kept buying billions of dollars in bonds to prove himself right. I loved reading about the training he received and what he was taught about selling bonds and how those folks really do view their customers. Some of the institutional stuff is a bit dated (but still valuable as history), but the human stuff still rings fresh and true because people and still, well, whatever it was they were back then.
If you just want an entertaining read - read this book. If you want to read about the early go-go years in the bond trading and the pre-boom boom years on Wall Street - read this book. If you want to learn about some of the big names in finance and what they did - read this book. You get the idea. I am saying you should read this book and you will be glad you did. Really.

I love reading books about lightning in a bottle, those unique times in specific industries that change the company, the industry, the country, or the world. This book gives a first hand account of one of those moments in the bond industry on wall street in the 1980's. The floodgates of the bond market opened creating huge sums of wealth for some and chaos for others, and Lewis was there to live it and entertainingly capture it for us

If you want to know what the big Wall Street bond firms were like, before the MBAs took over, this is the book. It's a great portrait of 1980s Wall Street, the way that traders and investment bankers used to appear (in the eyes of the young MBAs they hired) and the ridiculous training that newcomers received. It's not a pretty picture, but if you want to know what happened recently you have to remember that the current mess happened when a different group was in charge. That group included Michael Lewis's peers, the well educated, affluent Ivy Leaguers who run Wall Street today and took the places of the BSDs. (Lewis's term meaning big, swinging...well you get the idea.) The current mess was also created by the banks, who were just beginning to enter the market in the 80s.

Engaging as it is, studying Liars Poker to understand today's Wall Street is like studying the Carter Administration (before the Reagan administration privatized a thousands of governmental operations) to find out how federal government "really works." Who were the BSDs that Lewis describes? In 1975 a white man (and you had to be both) with smarts and a recent degree in any subject from a state college, could get a job at a bond firm by using connections. Connections were everything. This guy's boss probably did not have a college degree. (The college degree jobs went to stock brokers and private and commercial bankers.) The key talent for 1970s traders on the way up was the ability to crunch numbers very quickly without pencil and paper. By 1985, with talent and nerve, the bond trader who had started ten years before, could be making millions for himself and for his firm.

This guy was the BSD that Lewis describes. And this guy hired the MBAs who were only beginning to have a foothold when Lewis worked at Salomon.

Michael Lewis tells the engaging story of how a talented MBA joined Salomon Brothers and was simply astonished by the culture. What he describes isa culture where a formal education takes a back seat to chutzpah. Lewis's descriptions of uneducated, but astonishingly rich, men doing things like meeting the Queen Mother in England, are hilarious.

What Lewis cannot tell you (because the book was published so long ago) is how Wall Street replaced those guys with men and women who look and sound like Lewis. Salomon, once a firm of 7000 headed by its founder, is now part of Citigroup. The BSD's with their coarse language, huge lunches and cigars have been replaced with highly paid MBAs who know exactly what looks bad on an expense report, would know what to say to the Queen Mother. Is this better? Well, it's different.

I worked on Wall Street, at big banks and at Salomon, before and after the change.

The typical BSD that Lewis describes couldn't get a job on today's Wall Street. The Liar's Poker portrait of the gross, uneducated, cigar smoking, overweight middle-aged trader is something that every firm makes it a point to avoid. Firms hire young people (emphasis on young) with fantastic academic backgrounds and Hollywood good looks. Traders today are still mostly male and white, but they come from affluent, highly educated backgrounds. The firms hire more women and minorities from the best schools so while the numbers still show mostly white men, the annual report pictures and the EEOC audits go better. Sexual harrassment, which was rampant in the 80s still happens (as it does everywhere) but because of huge lawsuits, firms have HR departments that will come down on any employee (includng traders) like a ton of bricks if the firm's money or reputation are put at risk.

The current Wall Street mess wasn't created by Liar's Poker crowd. Trading with computer models was something few understood. Today's trader is tied to his computer and Blackberry and there is no assistant to enter the tickets. There are no tickets to be hidden or manipulated. By the early 90s the BSD's described in this book, older men with their lightening fast calculations, street smarts, nerve and passion for the game, had all but been replaced by Harvard, Yale and Wharton MBAs.

When this book was written the Mortgage Backed Securities Market was just taking off. Most banks were still holding their loans on the books, not selling them bundles. Fannie Mae still thought it was part of the government and hadn't gone completely off the reservation. It was the Michael Lewis's peers, the ones who did not get out when he did, along with a myriad of other people involved in mortgages and credit, who caused the current mess.

The BSD's do make a good target though.

If he didn't describe it with such wry, amused detachment, Michael Lewis' chronicle of his time at Salomon Brothers during the 1980s could easily be mistaken for a modern installment of Dante's inferno. Each day on the trading floor, as computers blinked and eager brokers barked into the phone, bright young people yielded to siren call of greed. Personal destruction was the goal of the game, as Darwinism ran rampant and the strong metaphorically devoured the weak as a matter of course.
Somehow Lewis avoids turning this often disturbing display of human baseness into a morality play. His sense of humor is most likely what allowed to him survive, and even succeed, during his time in the lion's den. In "Liar's Poker", he uses it to great effect, painting vivid portraits of the colorfully flawed egoists who drove the bond market into excess and chaos. For all their blustering, Lewis reveals many of the redoubtable players in the bond game to be sad and insecure, and avoids the temptation to pass judgement on them.
It's no wonder that Lewis finally answered his calling in journalism, because he displays amazing skill here, and not only as a writer and observer of the human condition. He's equally adept at ferreting out facts, analyzing them, and presenting them to lay readers in an entirely comprehensible way. In the course of his rollicking story, he manages to deliver a pretty detailed lesson on the basics of finance, the bond market, and the ways it impacts our daily lives.
As a neophyte himself when he went into investment banking, Lewis seems to tutor the reader even as he's learning some of the basics himself. He explains how the bond market drama of the eighties began with the adoption of a new operating system by the fed, targeting money supply growth instead of interest rates. This caused bond prices to swing wildly and created a window of opportunity for traders in the heretofore backwater bond market to reap huge sums in arbitrage. At the same time, consumer and government debt skyrocketed, creating a enormous demand for fixed income products.
Many of the big shots, "or "Big Swinging...", as Lewis often
refers to them, happened to be in the right place at the right time. Luck definitely played a large part in making many of them legends. As for Lewis himself, he emerges as one of the luckiest of all, escaping with a rich experience, the material for a terrific book, and maybe even his soul.

In many ways, it is not clear what sort of book Lewis intends to write. At times, it is a memoir, at times simple gossip, and in others a guide to how the street works. It is a testimony to Lewis' skills as a journalist that he largely succeeds in each of this tasks, giving clear explanations of both the rise of the mortage market and Milken's revolutionary ways with junk bonds, while managing to capture the surprising undercurrents of life in a Wall Street investment firm. It is, needless to say, not pretty -- and Lewis cynically (though honestly, I think) captures the petty interests and conflicts of interest that dominate the trading floor. I am not sure where to put my money now, but I am certainly keeping it away from those banks! There are, however, some unexpected heroes in the book. Lew Raineri's hard charging mortage desk, a bastion of old fashioned ideals (which is itself a good and a bad thing), is portrayed in loving and often hilarious detail, despite the lack of first hand experience, while Michael Milken's junk bond antics are singled out for special appreciation. These choices may seem suspect now -- Raineri's success didn't outlive the competition and Milken is now widely regarded as a villain, but Lewis' perspective has the advantage of capturing the time in which these views were developed. As history, it is fascinating if not always correct.
The final pages of the book depict, somewhat artificially, Salomon Brothers as it grapples with a take over bid. The action, while dramatic, seems more like a pretense for a big finish than the climax of the story Lewis is telling. The market went on, and so did Salomon brothers. But Lewis left, and his reasoning is unclear. He was certainly successful, and stood to be more so. His stated reasons seem unsatisfying, and the distance between his experiences during the book and his reluctance to share more intimate details of the forces that compelled his decision ultimately renders the conclusion unsatisfying.
This is a small complaint, however, and the book is certainly worth reading. Look for When Genius Failed for an update on some of the characters of Liar's Poker. It follows John Meriwether's ultimately unsuccessful attempts to revolutionize options trading and proves a compelling sequel (of sorts) to this book.

Probably the best place to start with Michael Lewis. This is about his time at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street in the 1980s. It’s hilarious, and really details a lot of the glut and assholery you see in movies like Wolf of Wall Street. But honestly, anywhere you start with Michael Lewis will be pretty good.

This book is your primer to what happened to the US economy long after it was penned.

As a financier who worked amongst all of the moving parts herein defined, I can spell it out to you in simple terms: If loan becomes more valuable than its collateral, it's worthless.

Liar's Poker is now a period piece which unintentionally disected the groundwork for the disasterous bogus inflation of mortgage values, which pushed up home values, in the buildup to the 2008 crash.

The author seems to have been intent on just getting inside as an employee long enough to write the book, but he did manage to pull off more of an expose than I believe even he himself thought at the time.

The history of the notorious invention of "traunching" mortgage risk, by Solomon Bros in the 1980's, was later unleashed to its full capacity for destruction by the elimnation of related regulation and anit-monopoly rules in the 2000's. In hindsight, it's rediculously obvious.

On a dive boat with one of the employees of the the primary character in 1998, he told me they were 'knocking it out of the park' by making mortgages to 125% of value. That's when I got out of that business.

A great read, written with great humor, this book is an educational classic I recommend all the time.

This book was written in 1989 by Michael Lewis after two years as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers. The book ranges over a numer of topics: his recruitment and training, Salomon's earlier rise to prominence in bond trading, and in particular its early dominance of mortgage bonds, the author's experience as a Big Swinging Dick in London, the rise of Drexel Burnham and junk bonds, the stock crash of 1987, and the author's subsequent departure from the bank.

Of particular interest today, two decades later, is the description of how Salomon created the first mortgage securities department on Wall Street, with Bob Dall and Lewie Ranieri selling Ginnie Maes. In 1979 a policy change by the Federal Reserve to fluctuate interest rates was accompanied by an explosion of debt and rapid growth in bond markets - and established players such as Salomons. Ironically, at first the mortgage market was hit badly by rising interest rates, but then two years later Congress passed a tax break for savings and loans that incented them en masse to securitize and sell their loans: the resulting flood into the market enabled a handful of Salomon mortgage traders to make $800 million in four years. The traders, however, were not individually compensated in line with their extraordinary profits, allowing them to be poached by Merril Lynch, First Boston, Shearson Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Prudential Bache and Drexel Burnham. The resulting competition reduced the bank's profits, but so also did the spread of collateralized mortgage obligations (CMO) that blended pools of mortgage bonds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, creating instruments that were more predicatable and better priced. CMOs were then tweaked in various ways to sidestep regulation, and in particular to allow thrifts to carry them "off-balance sheet". Eventually Ranieri was promoted away from mortgage securities and pushed out of the bank.

The remainder of the book is more biographical, with numerous anecdotes and comments on the culture at Salomon's that I found entertaining but perhaps not as insightful.

Unlike (nearly all, or all) academic economics books, which 'explain' that arbitrage does not and cannot exist, Lewis explains to us how the big bond houses live from arbitrage (buying low from the government or somewhere else and selling a bit higher to you and me). The book is a rare, a highly entertaining and very informative jewel: Lewis rightfully and poetically calls brokerage houses 'full servive casinos', far better than Monte Carlo or Las Vegas. Not only will they accept and place your bets, they'll also lend you (a large fraction of) the money needed to place your bets (margin)! A very good book to read now (1/27/00) during the 'wild ride' before the present big market bubble goes: POP!
Unfortunately, Lewis tells us too litlte about Meriwether, who later seduced two of the top finance academics (they were willing) and, with their aid, constructed the huge, uncontrolled experiment in 'equilibrium theory' called 'Long Term Capital Management' (LTCM). Their philosophy, also believed uncritically by most working economists, was and likely still is: Equilibrium will prevail (even in the absence of restoring forces!). For the continuation of the story where Liar's poker leaves off ('portfolio insurance', arbitrage and more arbitrage, and the formation and collapse of the bubble called LTCM), see the new book "Inventing Money".

*
This book is for everybody. Even if you've never worked in finance in your life, you will still think it's funny and entertaining. Besides which, you will get a thorough education on the bond market and its growth in the mid eighties.
Since this was one of the books often referred to by MBA programmes, I was hesitant at first to read it (one of my pet hates is all those silly books about "how to" from supposed "experts" who have since lost all their money or credibility because they were too greedy or didn't see change coming - which is why they had to write the book). Yet, I found myself in need of literature one day and spotted the distinctive yellow cover (in Singapore at least). I was attracted immediately by the title and then proceeded to read the first paragraph. I almost sat down promptly on the floor to keep reading it - a good sign that this was good reading.
Lewis has a talent for story telling. He combines this talent with an uncanny ability to be able to explain a very complex market in a very simple way. The "pull" of this story is that you KNOW it really happened. It is easy to cast your mind in the author's shoes, and BE on the trading floor with him. You can feel the excitement when the market turns, taste the sweat of other traders, hear the noise of the commotion on the 42nd floor, and sense the tense environment created by several hundred people in one area all trying to make a quick buck.
The story begins by an explanation of the game "Liar's Poker" itself. From then on, the gambling begins and the dice continue to roll ... the very bizarre way in which Michael gets a much sought after position at a prestigious investment bank ... to an intriguing story about the movers and shakers at Salomon Brothers, and the company's inevitable downfall.
Pseudonyms, of course, are used. But we can all imagine what "the Human Piranha" looks like and certainly know what type of person this is. Women can despise the competitiveness and prejudice that reaches its ultimate point in this type of environment, and is practised only by men, for men.
The book tails off a little at the end. The author (rightly) describes how his career takes off with the company and his inevitable resignation from the firm (Michael, I'm totally with you -- it takes a certain type of person, without scrupples or morals to be able to sustain themselves in this type of workplace).
The only slight weakness is that the author tries to justify his choice at the end (there's no need to, because we understand why early on), by saying "money isn't everything". Sure, it is not everything, but it's a lot to those who haven't got any.
*

Michael Lewis gives a very entertaining, human, and disturbing view of Watt Street that is eminently readable and comprehensible. He has captured his personal experience beautifully as Solomon Brothers was in the midst of dramatic change that presaged the 2007-8 collapse of the global financial system. He deftly shows how the immense edifices and temples of our financial system always boil down to the same inescapable essence - a relatively few, often hubris-encumbered people with otherworldly compensation who have become most adept at perfecting Wall Street's essential craft: the unabashed advancement of #1. An excellent, exciting, and easy read.

Michael Lewis launched his successful career as an author with his book Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, which is both a youthful memoir and a journalistic look at the inner workings of Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street firm that grew fat trading bonds and then crashed and burned. The book takes place, roughly, between the years 1984 and 1987, and so I wasn't surprised that the book reminded me of the movie Wall Street - just replace Gordon Gecko with Salomon's head John Gutfreund. At the beginning of the book, Lewis has just been hired, quite unexpectedly, by Salomon, and he takes us through his trajectory at the company, from the cut-throat training process to his days as a bond trader in London. From this vantage point, Lewis was able to watch the company, emboldened by spectacular success in the 1980s, become a symbol of corporate gluttony. Along the way, Lewis profiles many of the company's outsized personalities. He also delves into the intricacies of the bond market in such a way that the arcane becomes pretty readable. The book is also filled with anecdotes about the conspicuous consumption of those times and the raucous, inelegant trading floor, filled with foul-mouthed traders who threw phones and insults and reveled in their gluttony. Lewis' revelation was that the company (and its competitors) made profits at the expense of its customers, and, while the period that Lewis chronicles is interesting in its own right, its impact is somewhat diminished by the many corporate scandals and Wall Street improprieties that have occurred since the book was first published. Against this backdrop, Liar's Poker is no longer an exceptional story that defined an era, it is merely another moment in the cycle of Wall Street corruption and ensuing retribution that continues today.

Quite an entertaining read with vivid insight into the trading floors of Salomon Brothers. The author however seems to get confused on whether this is supposed to be a narrative versus a technical book; as such, fulfills neither optimally and at times seems to be an odd mish-mash of both. Overall organization could definitely have used much more stringent editing standards to make the book flow better.

This is not only a very informative book, but also quite entertaining. I'm now reading my third book by Lewis,and continue to be engaged by him. He humanizes a very arcane world and makes it accessible to,those of us who are completely baffled by the machinations of "big money." AND he makes his books available on kindle unlimited, although I had bought FLASH BOYS hardcover before I discovered that. To me that says very clearly that Lewis is not just about the money. He apparently wants his info to reach as many people as possible. Thank you, Michael Lewis.

This is Michael Lewis's first book, and in my opinion by far the best. It takes place at Salomon Brothers, the famed former investment bank (now part of Citigroup) that had a reputation for a brash culture and greed. Michael is a new member of the sales and trading desk in the 1980s, a time when Salomon dominated the bond markets and pioneered the mortgage backed securities market.
In an often cynical but always humorous style, the author describes the internal dynamics of Salomon, where testosterone filled the trading floor and greed was placed above everything. Since the book was published, Salomon got in a lot of trouble for illegal actions in the government securtities market, involving Gutfreund (in the book) and Meriwether (of When Genius Failed fame). In was actually interesting to meet one of the characters, Mike Mortara, who was at the time head of fixed income at Goldman Sachs.
Overall this is a funny little entertaining book, and a must if you are going to work on Wall Street, since people assume you are familiar with it and may even quote from it.

Another winner by Michael Lewis. I have read most of his material through the years but somehow missed one of his first. I really enjoyed the discussion when he was starting out at Salomon and the different characters in his training class.

The last 50 pages got a bit boring but touched on important topics like CDO's and LBO's. I would recommend "Barbarians At the Gate" for a look at Leveraged Buyouts.

The epilogue was great with his discussion on money not making someone happy. Great stuff.

My expectations of this book were perhaps mislead. I thought that this would deal with more the generalized view of Wall Street. However, it really concentrates on the lives of traders.
Lewis does shed some light on Wall Street trading in general, including a good description of mortgage trading and junk bond trading. However, this book sort of throws it into the mix. I wasn't sure what Lewis was trying to do. Sometimes it felt like a history book, sometimes a biography, sometimes an economics lesson, sometimes a comedy. It felt haphazard and lacked direction, and with the writing style presented, it lacked a certain amount of fluidity.
It was fun to learn the different people in Wall Street. From the obese, abusive traders, the short sighted and greedy executives, the brown nosers, to the "back row" trainees. It's basically a fun little description of office life at Solomon Brothers in the eighties, not an exciting expose on the finance industry as the cover would like you to believe.

"Liar's Poker" is an insider's view of life at an investment bank. It is written in a cynical tone, with plenty of self-deprecating quips such as "It [end of year bonus] was more than I had contributed to society; Christ, if social contribution had been the measure, I should have been billed rather than paid at the end of the year."

The book portrays Wall Street as a testsoterone driven money making factory. It is OK to gouge the clients as long as it makes money for the firm. In fact, such activities are actively encouraged. The bottom line is always the bottom line. It matters not if you have to crawl over the corpse of your best friend to stab your colleague in the back. If, at the end of the year you made a lot of money for the firm then you were in line for a fat bonus and a round of back slapping from the "Big Swinging Dicks". Wall Street is a fine example of Darwinian forces at work. It is a near pure meritocracy where the strong survive and the weak are swallowed whole.

I found the book highly entertaining. The author is not a professional writer, and this shows in certain sections of the book where the prose is unpolished. Nonetheless, a highly entertaining sojourn into Salomon Brothers and if you have even a passing interest in finance or investment banking, I recommend this as a good read.

This is a superb ,blow by blow, in the trenches,account of how the capital markets of the USA are organized and function on a day to day basis.In chapter 12 of the General Theory(GT},Keynes correctly categorized the financial markets as a game of Old Maid or Musical Chairs,where the goal is "...foreseeing changes in the conventional basis of valuation a short time ahead of the general public"(Keynes,1936,p.154).Wall Street speculators" are concerned,not with what an investment is really worth to a man who buys it "for keeps",but with what the market will value it at,under the influence of mass psychology,three months or a year hence"(Keynes would have said three minutes or three hours if he were writing the GT today)(Keynes,pp.154-155).The capital,financial and stock markets are not organized to maximize long run net present value,but very short run net present value.The markets are essentially based on a short run ,short sighted,pennywise poundfoolish approach that does not maximize long run economic growth and welfare.Keynes's views were the direct result of his extensive hands on experience in operating in such markets himself over a forty year period.The potential bookbuyer is urged to read this book simultaneously with chapter 12 of the GT.

"Liar's Poker" is a memoir of Michael Lewis' 3 years as a bond salesman for the investment firm Salomon Brothers, Wall Street's premier bond brokerage in the early 1980s. It follows Lewis' career from his serendipitous introduction to the firm, through his initiation as a trainee in 1985, to 1988, while recounting the history of Salomon Brothers' rise to bond dominance and subsequent fall brought on by excesses, poor management, and failure to compete in the junk bond market. Lewis' literate, swiftly paced prose paints a vivid picture of Salomon Brothers' boorish, competitive culture amid the frenzied atmosphere of a rapidly changing late 1980s economy. It shifts effortlessly between trading floor anecdotes and explanations of the mortgage trading department without seeming to digress. Well-written, insightful, and often hysterically funny, "Liar's Poker" is one of those rare Wall Street books that is immensely entertaining -and mostly true. I don't know if someone with no interest in finance would enjoy it, but no knowledge of the bond market in required to understand it. I have heard it said that "Liar's Poker" is accurate in its portrayal of Salomon Brothers but less so in the author's position at the firm. But it hardly matters if the account is somewhat fictionalized. It's just a great read.

I read this book because it was one in a list recommended by a trader I respected. I had heard of it before and was aware it was a 'traders' book to read and has received many good reviews.

I've read many trading books from eg the classic Market Wizzards to recently Pit Bull, but was disappointed to find this book isn't really about trading or 'real traders'. It;s more about brokers.

It does give a reasonably interesting account into the life of Lehman Bros in the early days. In that respect I found it a fairly interesting history lesson of a world I never knew about.

Perhaps I'm being harsh as I'm judging the book purely from it's benefit to me as a trader, of which it was no use.I don't know know why this book is recommended as 'essential' reading for traders.

Listen, if you are a real trader, or want to read a book about trading, I suggest read some of the other classics.
If you are interested in the history, world and characters of the financial past, I suspect you will find this book interesting.

It wasn't for me.

P.s. please let me know if you find this review helpful to you because I have read many more books on trading , some of which are real gems and I can write a review on them to help you decide.. just it takes quite a lot of time and only want to do if of use to someone :)

A well-written book that exposes the "Money-is-God" attitude of Wall Street. From the profane, fat, slovenly, polyester-wearing traders that stuff their mouths all day long, to the frat-boy Ivy League trainees who heave paper-wads at the Salomon directors speaking in the training classes, one gets a highly accurate picture of the inside of a Wall Street investment banking firm.
I was particularly amused by two anecdotes; the author had his first encounter with Salomon Brothers when he was seated next to the wife of a Salomon director at a St. James Palace dinner hosted by the Queen Mother. Of course, as close as she would get to the guests would be to stroll out of the room followed by her trained Corgi dogs who genuflect every 15 seconds. Perhaps insulted by the Queen Mother's indifference at her presence, the director's wife shouted out, "Hey Queen, nice dogs you have there!" after she passed. The second amusing anecdote occurs when the author is interviewed several times but not offered a job. Eventually a friend tells him that Salomon does not actually offer someone a job. Consequently, the author calls up the firm and says, "I accept the position", upon which he is welcomed as a new member of Salomon Brothers.
The book also exposes the dirty little secret that Wall Street makes its money by entering into adversarial relationships with their clients. The author refers to this as "taking the other side of the fool". Specifically, Wall Street attempts to keep spreads on securities artificially wide in order to pocket that spread, for which they were ultimately busted by the SEC and heavily fined. They also hype stocks that they know are garbage because they have investment banking relationships with those companies (Merrill Lynch was just busted for this by the state of New York and heavily fined). Also, the investment banking fees they charge their clients to raise capital are grossly excessive, but their clients are too naive to understand this, or perhaps more accurately do not even care.
Ultimately, the decline of the company that is chronicled in the book provides the following insight; even though Salomon always tried to hire the best and the brightest, this "talent" was eventually negated by the incompetence that arises from any hierarchical organization. That is to say, the brilliance of the few is always neutralized by the incompetence of the many inherent in the corporate structure.

Michael Lewis was still a bond salesman at Solomon Brothers when he began writing Liar's Poker, and it is obvious that he was right in the middle of the action this book discusses. The book is set in the frenzied 1980's when bond traders were raking in millions of dollars a year and were at the top of the investment banking-heap. It is a wild world where unbelieveably confident, ambitious, and greedy men put their all (their money, time, and energy--all of which they have in large reserves)into making more money than anyone else in their firm and any other firm on Wall Street. Lewis is always funny and a very careful observer of the world which he describes, so this is a wonderful insider's perspective of a fascinating career. It really makes investment banking come alive, does a wonderful job explaining complicated financial matter, and though it is non-fiction all of the outlandish characters make it a very entertaining read. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in finance or who just want to read a very well written, fun book about "the real world."

This was a really funny book that also gave me quite an education in investment banking and the world of finance. "Liar's Poker" is very well-written, and keeps things moving. While the subject matter may be complicated, Lewis keeps it comprehensible to those of us who don't have an MBA. It's fascinating to see how the big players work the markets - and in some cases, manipulate them outright. Indeed, "Liar's Poker" gives us a front-row seat to the creation of the mortgage-backed debt obligations that are commonly traded today, and that allowed the current real estate bubble to inflate as large as it has.
Lewis' analysis of Salomon and its problems applies in many respects to professional service firms in general. Having worked in a law firm during the recent boom years, I can say that rapid growth and an abundance of cash can lead to hubris, disorganization, and a loss of core values. Lawyers, accountants, and anyone else who works at a professional service firm will particularly enjoy this book.

Not really sure what to think about this book. I'm not really interested in finance or Wall Street. It's not that the subject was boring, per se, but I just didn't feel involved in the narrative Lewis is trying to tell.

Having read The Big Short and other Lewis writings, I expected more analysis, not realizing this was partly an autobiography. Nevertheless, the book was informative and entertaining, if not as enlightening as The Big Short. Having spent a career in finance and accounting, I love reading about the inner workings of firms such as Salomon Brothers. Lewis' writing is straightforward and compelling as ever. It would be interesting for him to update this work with his thoughts on events after 1989.

I found this book very good to read especially during the current financial crisis. Even though the author wrote it in the 80s, it shows the culture and business of investing. The author used to be a bond salesman in the New York and London offices of Salomon Brothers.

The description of the S&L crisis is in a way similar to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The greed and obsession with money made both crises possible. After reading this book, I realized that no matter how much regulation we have, we will experience similar events. Yesterday, it was the S&L crisis, today it is the subprime mortgage crisis, and tomorrow the greedy minds of Wall Street will create something even more interesting that will have more devastating effects.

For those who are not familiar with the business of high finance, this book will be an eye-opener. It shows what traders, salesmen, and executives of Wall Street firms do every day to make money by taking huge risks with the hope of a payoff. I absolutely loved this book and highly recommend it.

- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

This book, and Predators Ball, really started the boom in financial writing as it pertains to what it is like to actually work on Wall Street. Having spent 3 years working for 2 different firms in research I can say that some very interesting people work on Wall Street. Some are very average people with phenomenal work ethic whereas some are quite comparable to people out of the Wild West.
Anyone who is considering going into the financial services industry in trading, sales or research should read this. I tell you to read it because it does describe how cut throat the business is and it does provide some entertaining insightful look at characters in the industry. Liar's Poker provides a good top down look at the characters and process of Wall Street. This book, in particular, focuses on the rise of Soloman Brothers and its trading.
Other books of interest would be John Train's Money Masters and New Money Masters (2 different books) that discusses the world's best portfolio managers and traders. Both are excellent reading.

If you have deluded yourself into thinking the financial 'wizards' know what they are doing, think again. I have long been a fan of Michael Lewis and his ability to make the complex inter-relationships of individuals who maneuver the market not only understandable, but entertaining in the process. Lewis draws from personal experience mixed with a sort of self-deprecating humor to explain the downfall of companies, individuals and the market during the 80's. Shocking to learn that we were basically at the mercy of back-stabbing & money grubbing individuals, companies & even countries, all trying to out maneuver the other while individual investors swung in the breeze. This is the primer to buyer beware. Knowing when to get in, when to get out & watching out for No. One is the key. Odd, things don't seem to have changed much....

What a great read. A friend of mine recommended this to me and I can say that it certainly was a refreshing read.
This book tells you about some of the influential people who shaped Salomon Brothers and Wall St in the eighties. I never realised the history that went with Salomon Brothers.
The style is great and I can really identify with the author's early years going through the stages of obtaining and starting a job. Some of the characters in the book are hilarious, you can only just believe they are real.
Only one complaint: sometimes the author goes on for quite a long time with his history e.g. the history of junk bonds and the history of various people in SB. I only wish that there was more about the author's story.
Only one gripe though, and it can't prevent this from being a 5 star book.
Buy it now! Thanks to the book, I am now constantly searching for books like this but this is the only one I have found recounting the story of a salesman as opposed to a trader.

I picked up a copy of this book after reading Moneyball - Michael Lewis's book on the business of baseball (an excellent book that I have now read several times). Although Wall Street does not hold the interest to me that baseball does, this is an entertaining and informative book on big money trading in the 80's. I was engaged from start to finish with the personalities of the folks at Salomon Brothers (the firm which Lewis trained and worked for). Although I am not familiar with the details of bond trading, this was a facinating journey and well told. Fun to read about Milken, Perelman, Icahn from the days when they were only known by readers of the Wall Street Journal and not household names. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys finding out about corporate culture and how the personalities of the individual can shape and effect the whole. Then pick-up Moneyball and see how a maverick personality has started to effect change in baseball.

There are a large number of young people (now in their mid-forties) who, like myself, have been fundamentally influenced by the contents of this book. While the author himself will absolutely cringe at this notion, he will certainly acknowledge that the insider tale spun from his time working at Salomon Brothers convinced many a young college graduate to turn to investment banking as a career.

Personally my life took a different turn after reading this book, as I knew a person like me (a person of strong ethical inclination) had no business being on Wall Street.

It is my belief that anyone with a 401K account, IRA, or managed stock portfolio would benefit from reading this book. Inside you will get a series of indelible images of the types of people and personalities who work beyond the reach of the public and the law and never EVER have your best interests at heart.

Liar's Poker may not stop you from investing, but at the very least you can expect to have the blinders removed when you do put your money at risk.

Really interesting book about life as an investment banker. Also, it's very eye opening on the exorbitant amount of money is made by those working on Wall Street. The book read well and kept me engaged for the most part, but did drag a bit at times. Overall though, I really enjoy Lewis' work. I've read a couple other books of his and he hasn't disappointed me yet.

Liars' Poker is the quintessential business novel. Everyone businessman I know has either read it or heard of it. So, I decided that I should check it out.
This book is an account of Michael Lewis' time at Salomon Smith Barney in the mid 80s, at the height of the junk bond craze. He perfectly describes the atmosphere of competitiveness and the vast rewards everyone was reaping as a result of the boom.
What came as a surprise to me is that Lewis describes the mortgage bond market, an obtuse and vague instrument, very clearly and in a way most non-business people could also understand. This explanation also serves to show why these junk bonds ultimately collapsed.
Then, of course, are his hilarious descriptions of his orientation, his bosses and coworkers. To read about these outlandish characters is worth the price of the book alone.
So, to close, this book is a classic for a reason. It is informative and well written, but manages to be hilarious at the same time, a feat few authors can achieve. Read this book at all costs.

Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker is a must read for anyone trying to understand the 2008 crisis in mortgage lending and home ownership. In fact, a new edition of the book should be published with a forward by Ben Bernake or Hank Paulson. The autobiography describes a mid-1980's newbie to Wall Street and his induction into the fraternity of mortgage traders at Salomon Brothers and junk bond traders at Drexel. This book rises above a rite of passage story because of the financial chaos which happened during the next three decades.

The 41st trading floor of Salomon Brothers is where millions of dollars exchange hands in minutes. There is a blue collar culture of practical jokes, profanity, Mexican food and pizza. The characters might have come right out of Damon Runyon or Animal House. The main difference between the interns, the traders and the clerks is neither their demeanor nor education but their wealth. In contrast to other books which tell us about the best and the brightest, this book describes ordinary people with excess body fat, perspiration, greed and wealth.

As more homeowners face foreclosure and the US dollar loses value, it is not clear what message to derive from this book. Were it not for these failures of economic policy the book would join other interesting stories about the rich and privileged of Wall Street. But because of this failure of oversight, the book takes us from humor to cynicism and from a sense of national pride to a feeling of national shame.

Is there a ratio of capitalistic reward to risk which is unconscionable in a democratic society? Can this behavior be limited or controlled by financial transparency, tax code, money supply and credit leverage? How do we avoid these consequences of the creation and destruction of capital without moving down the path of socialism? Can we ever put to rest the saying that behind every great fortune is a great crime?

Liar's Poker is to future investment bankers as Scott Turow's One L is to future law students. Not only is this book informative, it's entertaining and filled with a vast array of characters. Lewis has the gift or storytelling. Not only does the book cover the process by which the author got the job offer at Salomon Brothers coming out of the London School of Economics and the fearful weeks of the Training Program in New York, he aptly tells the story of the firm and its rise and fall, from the beginning of mortgage-backed securities and the millions made by MBS traders to the crash of October 1987. This is an excellent book that my generation can learn from. And while the ability to communicate and trading technology has become faster, from what I can tell, many of the personalities within the i-banking world described in this book have not. This is an exciting book that will keep you reading. Know what happened twenty years ago and you firm will not likely send you to trade equities in Dallas.

Almost everyone who is graduating is tempted by the glamour and large bonuses of Investment Banks to wonder what it would be like to work in a large investment bank on Wall Street and actually consider it as a serious career option. LIAR'S POKER provides an irreverent, bird's eye view of the whole process. This is an extraordinarily funny but thought provoking account of a money focussed guy's innings at a venerable Investment bank Salomon Brothers, starting as a $48,000-a-year trainee in 1984 to go on to become an institutional bond salesman in Salomon's London office earning $225,000 in 1987. Far from just being entertaining the book gives lots of insight into the intense cutthroat investment banking industry and makes it accessible for even the naivest of readers the intricacies of the milieu. An insider's look at the inside of an investor banking firm, with no holds barred, which makes it probably one of the most recommended books for anyone considering more than a passing acquaintance with the investment banking industry.

I got onto a finance reading kick recently, and Liar's Poker should have been near the beginning of my reading adventure. Why? He introduces some characters and problems that percolate through all of the other later stories. Wall Street seems perpetually plagued with only doing good for Wall Street.

The narrative is funny at times. He got lucky, got a job, and then almost got rich. But, along the way, luckily, he kept his artist eye open and saw the follies of those around him and ultimately sees his own foolishness in participating. A good read. I'd recommend it.

I read this years ago and just read the kindle version on a friend's unit while traveling. Better the second time after living through the bubble-burst in the 90's and then our latest crash in 2008. If you don't love the stock market or have never been (and no interest) in going to NYC, you probably won't like this piece -- but otherwise it's a great ride. If you play poker (either figuratively or IRL) and love the stock market, this book actually is a timeless depiction on what WILL continue to REPEAT ITSELF -- just like the Wall Street and economic cycles in this country. Learn from it and you can actually benefit -- pure greed -- but Lewis does a great job of giving you the different perspectives and defining the personalities of characters to a point that's extremely entertaining.

This book is Michael Lewis' account of his experience and observations in starting his career working on Wall St (and in London) for Solomon Bros as a bond salesman in the 80s. As the book progresses the reader sees Lewis move through his rite of passage from being a bottom of the totem pole trainee/"geek" to a respected salesman and up-and-commer in the firm. This was a good book from an entertainment perspective so I would recommend it to anyone both inside or outside of the field of finance. I really like Lewis' writing style -- he's a to-the-point writer who calls it like he sees it (but not in a cavalier sort of way) and the book is filled with his amusing quips, funny stories, and ironies. Highly recommend it.

LIAR's POKER by Michael Lewis is an interesting exploration of the excesses of investment banking, trading in the 1980s. The author's many anecdotes throughout the book are often fairly amusing, particularly his description of mortgage traders as well as the students who sat in the back row of his Salomon Brothers training class. More importantly, however, the book covers many important themes. I believe the book actually has something to teach the reader about mismanagement and the consequences of office politics. Furthermore, the nature of the broker is exposed insofar as his relationship to his employer and his client are concerned. That is, the broker will ultimately serve his employer at the expense of his client when necessary.

I recommend this book not only for amusement and insight on the go-go 1980s trading years, but also for the reader to pick-up on some of the themes of management, the impact of office politics, and the history of investment banking and trading.

This was a story which had to be told. And it had to be told from the inside. It couldn't have been done any other way, and Michael Lewis does a fairly god job of it.

The book essentially tells the story of the rise and fall from wealth (and grace) of Salomon Brothers, and in particular, their mortgage trading group. Those times were clearly heady ones, with the creation and destruction of ridiculous amounts of wealth - from thin air. (It's a more common phenomenon now given the increasing sizes and reaches of the global financial markets, but this probably represented the earliest of the really big cycles.) Lewis takes us deep into that world, giving us a view from a prime seat in the middle of the best action of those times - at Salomon Brothers. In doing so, he is able to create a fairly strong feel for that world, with all its extravagances and idiosyncrasies, while simultaneously providing a fair amount of objective narrative on the internal and external events. His fleshing out of the characters in the book is well done too, which allows the reader a fair level of involvement and empathy with the events. Another strength of the book is that Lewis never gets too technical, and is able to explain fairly complicated markets in terms simple enough for most people to understand.

On the flip side, I have to caution you that at the end of the day, Lewis might have been a good banker, but he's not a great writer. The book could have been taken to a different level altogether in the hands of a better writer, and much of the strength of this book is eventually derived from the story. That said, overall, I still think Lewis has done a very credible job, and the book is a very worthwhile read for everybody, not just bankers.

In the 1980s Salomon Brothers investment bank experienced its heyday trading bonds on Wall Street, and witnessing from inside the company itself was Michael Lewis, a rising trader in the firm's London office. Spoken from his point of view, Lewis details the rise and eventual tipping point of the firm while being a part of the testosterone fueled trading floor filled with money-thirsty employees.

Lewis, a Princeton art history major turned London School of Economics grad student, explains his career as a trader at Salomon Brothers. Through the training program to the London office, he experiences first-hand the revenue-driven trading floor. Here, in the "jungle" as his associates call it, traders have little regard for the well-being of their customers, often misleading clients into buying bonds at above market value for the sole purpose of making as money off their trades as possible.

The book takes an extended interlude in the middle to explain the history of the firm and the rise of the mortgage bond market, where Salomon Brothers had a near-monopoly, which became the source of much of their wealth. This section is effective in filling in the gaps for those who haven't had a history lesson on Wall Street in the 1980s. Lewis does this in a way that ties back to Salomon Brothers as well as the evolving market in mortgage bonds and junk bonds, both crucial in different ways to the fate of Salomon Brothers.

For those of us who previously viewed Wall Street as a bunch of stoic suits in glass high-rise offices, Lewis' inside account is revealing of how different the trading floor of Salomon Brothers actually functions. In fact, it can be likened to a fraternity more than a finance firm, with a culture suited towards rowdy alpha-males rather than finance professionals. It is astonishing and at times frightening how some of the characters act with their significant market power, inflated egos, and greed. While written around two decades prior, the reckless and greedy actions of those in bond trading make Lewis look prophetic in illustrating the consequences of their actions and how we've seen it repeat in the form of the 2008 recession.

Given the subject matter, it should come as no surprise that the book is more informative than exciting. However, Lewis effectively intersperses humor in order to keep certain chapters from being overly dense. That being said, nothing in the book feels forced or slanted as Lewis is able to give an honest, objective account of life at Salomon Brothers. The language is strong, but is necessary for Lewis to give a true impression of how Salomon Brothers functioned. Furthermore, he holds nothing back in showing the greed of the management of Salomon Brothers, and how it led to the decline of the firm due to poor management decisions.

One of my few complaints with the book is the lack of depth some of the characters have. Even some of the main players in Salomon Brothers seem two-dimensional, making it difficult to make any sort of connection with any of the Salomon Brothers traders and the anecdotes Lewis includes. This may bother those more focused on entertainment value as opposed to a purely informative look into a Wall Street trading firm such as Salomon Brothers.

Overall, Liar's Poker was a very enjoyable read for anyone either pursuing a career in finance or wanting to see an unabridged account of how a Wall Street firm operates. While the book focuses on Salomon Brothers, the firm is in many ways a microcosm of the industry as a whole in the 1980s. In case anyone doubted the responsibility of Wall Street for the 2008 recessions and issues with the mortgage market in general, this book will dispel any such doubts. It certainly will shed light on an industry notorious for not letting the public see it in action. Certainly, Liar's Poker is a worthwhile book to read.

Michael Lewis's ten-year-old account of his two-year stint as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers has become a literary classic in the world of finance, and has probably stroked aspirations in more Wall Street-bound MBAs than any other book. I know many an individual who, after reading the book, become so enamored with the culture described therein that they take it upon themselves to act like the "human piranha" or any of the other clownish characters from the book.
Having worked on Wall Street in various client-facing capacities over the years, especially as a trader with a volatile fund, I feel the book is a bit over melodramatic and over-sensational. Are there such personas on Wall Street? Absolutley. In fact the real people on Wall Street -- the traders, the whiteshoe i-bankers, the jewish deal-makers and deal-breakers -- can be even meaner, nastier than Lewis describes. But the clownish characters he creates are probably more fiction than real. Still, his observation that most traders have huge egos and are among the most despicable human beings (despite their MBAs, Ph.D.s, or MDs) to ever walk on earth, is deadly accurate. The constant politicking is captured vividly by the author, although, again, his writing seems to border on fiction quite often.
Don't take me wrong; I think this is a must-read for anyone interested in how Wall Street breathes and works. Lewis does a fine job at exposing the disgusting nature of greed, the only thing that feeds Wall Street's daily existence.

Coming from an "insider" this tells the story about the inner workings of the finance company rather beautifully. The situations created are hilarious and the author is certainly witty at times - which overall makes it a nice, light book to read. Some of the chracters created are very interesting and funny. However, I have two gripes. One, the author is unable to hide his dislike for his company's CEO and it comes out from the book that he is less than fair to him. Two, the book gets a little technical at times going into, for example, the details of how a mortgage bond work and why is better (or not) vis a vis a junk bond. Coming from a bond salesman they are not rather expected but they do take away the basic flow of the book. Overall a funny book with average grades.

I'd been meaning to read Liar's Poker for more than 20 years, since I read its first fawning reviews. I finally got around to reading it because I wanted its historical background before reading Lewis's recent book, The Big Short, about the crash of 2008.

I wouldn't have waited so long if I'd realized what a brilliant story teller Lewis is. The early chapters, about his education as a trader, are among the funniest writing I've ever read. The latter chapters are more informative and somewhat less comic, but Lewis's keen sense of the absurd makes every page a pleasure.

Liar's Poker, used as the title of the book, is a high risk game that salesmen and executives at Solomon Brothers played; the game was a true reflection of Solomon Brothers' organizational culture of high risk and high short-term profit - a real macho culture. The book is truly the funniest book you will ever read on Wall Street. Lewis first starts off his book by emphasizing the power of a network as the primary source of landing a job on Wall Street. He argues that one's first job is more about how many and what kind of people one knows rather what degree one graduates with. He then talks about how overwhelming and how bad his experience was during the training program at Solomon Brothers; a former Wall Street firm.
Throughout the book, Lewis describes an employee's life on Wall Street in a very humorous way and denounces bad management team of Solomon Brothers - referred to as "big swinging dicks" - under the leadership of John Gutfreund, the chairman at the time. He also explains what made Solomon Brothers one of the leading firms on Wall Street and the most powerful force in the financial market: the fact that they were building the bonds market while many firms on Wall Street were still busy trading stocks.
In fact, Lewis really gives reader an insider's look at the fast-paced and overwhelming life on Wall Street. The book is easy to read; you get hooked once you start reading and never going to put it down. The book is just hilarious; I recommend it to anyone interested in the financial markets and a future career on Wall Street.

If you even wondered what people do and what knd of people there are in those big buildings on Wall Street, this is your book. You see, from an insider's ironic detachment, how clueless these people were, how little they understood what they were doing with the incredible amounts of money seeking to make more money. Not only do they care little about what they are doing for their shareholders, but they make bad mistakes that ruins lives. The excesses - like huge buckets of guacamole for snacks or unbelievable arrogance - are sickening after a while.

Lewis writes extremely well, truly a unique voice. While I felt a bit disappointed pnce I finished the book as I gained little understanding of the protagonists' motivation and reflcetions (assuming they had any), the descriptions of what it was like are very interesting.

Recommended.

after reading various books on finance/investing/money, i found it highly refreshing to read a story-based book... one that encapsulates the joys and spoils of being a bond trader during the days of michael milken, salomon brothers and the likes.
gaining an inside perspective of how the market functions and who the money movers are is truly educational... being blind to the stories in this book is like trying to sail in the ocean without a mast!
although i found the book to be gauged in the days when bonds were hot and exciting, the overall reading experience was great.
from bonds, to mortgages, to interest rates, to the federal reserve, to bust... worth your time. enjoy...

Makes me wonder why anyone would trust their money with the quintessential picture of 1980's excess that was Solomon Brothers. Really interesting look on the inside of the firm and how things were run. As every Michael Lewis book seems to be; filled with witty humor and very detailed. A must read for Lewis fans or those interested in any financial sector. I would also recommend The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine and those interested in sports Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and The Blind Side (Movie Tie-in Edition).

I am a sucker for these kinds of books about the financial (and at times criminal) wizardry of Wall Street. I'm a voyeur peeping into a world that I know I will likely never inhabit. Michael Lewis doesn't disappoint in his insightful and absolutely hilarious best-seller on his experiences as a trainee and then a "Big Swinging Dick" bond salesman at Salomon Brothers. It's an immensely entertaining read and the pace never lets up as Lewis traces the meteoric rise of the Brothers (especially when it dominated mortgage-backed securities trading in the 1980s which also sowed the seeds of the current financial crisis) and exposes the first hints of its eventual demise as mismanagement, in-fighting and hypocrisy break up the Brothers. Highly recommended reading!

If you want a book that allows you to dream about the good old days where money was in plenty, attitudes rained supreme, and traders made big bets calling each others bluff, then this book is for you.

These times may not come back for a very long time, but it is in some ways parallel to the dot-com days in its exceptional nature of being out of the ordinary with a wealthy aroma in the air. Brokerage firms as described in Liar's Poker still have much of the same personalities, although cut throat competition has made it a much different landscape and not nearly as profitable as it once was. Still, if you work in the financial services sector, this is a good book to get back to the roots of the more mature bigwigs in your office that still have their moneyclips.

Liar's Poker reminded me of Voltaire's Candide and gave me comparable laughs. When a trader tells the young trainee Lewis that he is lower than "whale shit on the ocean floor", he recoils to a corner at the trading room "feeling the warmth of the whale shit". This is one of the funniest books I've read. Cynical, with the perfect timing of comedy, full of insights into the machinery of greed, it portrays Wall Street as the ship of fools. And at the last chapter, if you read between the lines, you will agree that he, too, concludes that the best choice is still to care for you own garden...
Read it and enjoy! Believe me, I never lie.

Liar's Poker is a memoir of Michael Lewis' brief career as a bond salesman with Salomon Brothers, which was the largest investment bank of its era (think Goldman Sachs today). While the book is often humorous and insightful, it lacks direction at times. The book begins and ends with Lewis' own experience, but jammed in the middle is a brief history of Salomon Brothers and the decisions they made in the 1980s. The most interesting and humorous narratives in the book come from Lewis' own experiences.

In addition to being a humorous take on Wall Street and its culture, the book also serves as a primer to anyone who is interested in the Wall Street today. Liar's Poker documents the creation of some of the financial instruments (mortgage bonds and CMOs)that are directly responsible for the financial mess American finds itself in today.

The book is a great, easy read, but you should borrow it from the library; the book isn't worth owning; you will read it once and never open it again.

RECOMMENDATION: Read, but don't buy.

LIAR'S POKER is a good read. This book offers a clever, even funny, first-hand analysis of what wrong with American business during the end of the 1980's. Author Michael Lewis provides a fascinating explanation, from an insider's point of view, of how those involved in the highest levels of the financial community made their obscene amounts of money--and how they destroyed the nation's economy in the process. His report is revelatory indeed. Anybody with an interest in the history of American business, or a curiosity about the high life in New York during an overheated decade, will find that LIAR'S POKER offers a great amount of detail.

At times funny but, for me, generally disturbing view of the interior workings of wall street. Lewis essentially squeals about the life Wall St. Insiders would prefer to keep hidden. With great clarity he describes how disconnected the Wall St. Financial system has
become from it's purpose of allocating capital most productively. Any scam is justified to enrich the firm and or it's employees. As
Lewis freely admits, Las Vegas would never accept the risk taking and reckless activities invented on Wall St. - Vegas would not consider it good business.

Anyone interested in understanding how our our system continues to replicate one scam after another from Vesco's mutual funds scams in the sixtes on throughout the S&L scams during Lewis's 80's on to the recent scams of the late 90's and 2000's would be helped by Lewis's candor and frankness.

This inside view further encourages my belief that our capitalist system is not even close to a capitalist system at all. In fact American Capitalism(including Europe) could now best be summarized as a system of "Privatized Gain/Socialized Loss". I want all the gain when leverage is benifiting me but we must all share the loss when this leverage works against me. Lewis's inside expose only reinforces my feeling that some other hybrid state/privates system will be needed to deal with the realities of modern electronic money management. Perhaps this system will be developed In other developing nations or small independent developed nations. in any event Lewis makes it clear to me that a change must come or all the developed worlds wealth will, in my humble opinion, be frittered away - if it hasn't been already!

After have being reading many books on finance looking for a deeper knowledge, I saw the light. It doesn't matter what black shoultz formulas, beta values, fundamental analysis or technical patterns actually are. All these techniques are obvously usefull and necessary to be known (mainly to be able to speak about it), but bussines is another thing. Finance, understood as how money is moved and earned, is something else. It is closer to a good bottle of wine than to a better financial model. A hard lesson for a lover of techniques. From then, I saw markets in a very different way. The myth of shinning experts overcoming the market was blown-away. This is a useull learning to be applied in many areas of life and business.

Lewis is articulate, insightful, cynical, and hilarious in his analysis on the rise and fall of Investment Banking at Solomon Brothers during the 1980s. Liar's Poker is a brilliant portrayal of Wall Street during an era of unprecedented greed and arrogance. Until the early 1980s, equity traders were the most revered people in the industry. However, unforeseen circumstances, largely spurred by the highly leveraged Savings & Loan industry, led to the innovation of new types of financial derivatives. Essentially overnight, a new market for bonds was created for speculators and commercial banks. Volume and profits soared on the bond trading floor, and from that point on the bond traders were the "big swinging ...." of investment banking.
So, against the backdrop of billion-dollar deals and million-dollar salaries enters Michael Lewis, Princeton Art History major and unlikely protagonist. His depiction of the Fraternity-like culture of investment banking is laugh-out-loud, I wish I had thought of that, funny. Lewis reaches rare form in describing the Solomon mortgage traders, a group of fat, mean Italian men with street smarts and a dislike for Ivy League MBAs and every other group within the firm.
Nonetheless, Liar's poker is more than just funny-it's insightful. Lewis combines personal narrative and investigative journalism to present a fresh perspective on the collapse of Solomon Brothers. He argues that Solomon's superiority complex resulted in a failure to react to the changing trends in the industry and the retention of key personal. This book is a quick read and a lot of fun. I wouldn't list it as a reference in an academic publication but it's a great addition to the bookshelf.

Michael Lewis writes a very interesting, funny account of bond trading in the eighties. While I often like to escape in fictional novels when I read, this memoir of Lewis' experiences on Wall Street are entertaining enough to keep me coming back for more.

While some reviewers found his technical descriptions of mortgage backed securities, junk bonds, etc. a bit boring, I enjoyed learning more about the various investment options and how they got started. Lewis definitely gives you an inside look at the tricks and deception that could be used by the financial services industry - hoping that we "suckers" will be prompted to buy enough to make them the big bucks.

And that's the point of the book - this game is all about making money for the trader and their employer, screw everyone else. Lewis includes hints about how the money and reputation as a "Big Swinging Dick" is enough to overcome any feelings of guilt about "blowing up" companies or clients (the nickname alone tells you about the lack of women in the industry).

I also enjoyed learning about how traders see the world - and how fear is what really controls the market. If you understand fear, you become a great seller of bonds or equities. In fact, Lewis makes it clear that no one can really predict how the market will go. The most successful people in the industry are portrayed as being either great salesmen or having a true (though rare) understanding of the big picture effects of a causative event (in other words, how people react based on fear after an event).

There is a deeper message here too, if you are reading closely. Michael Lewis decided that trading his conscience for making money was not for him. He felt that he and others in his profession were reaping benefits "out of all proportion" to their value in society. He makes no attempt to change the reader's views on the right or wrong of the system - he lets us judge for ourselves.

Anyone working for a financial services company - especially if you are in an unrelated part of the business - should read this book. It offers great insight on what can seem like perplexing aspects of the company culture. And if you don't work for a financial services company, you would still be better off reading this book, if only to learn how not to be a "sucker" for the financial gain of a "Big Swinging Dick."

I am the age of many characters in this book including the author and had a fascination with Wall Street in the 1980's. I enjoyed this book as history that I lived through. Currently I work for Alaska Airlines, a company that is very image conscious and whose senior executives would sell out any group of employees for an additional nickel of bonus money. These Alaska Airlines executives came of age at the same time as the characters in Liar's Poker and have similar moral compasses. Liar's Poker should be mandatory reading for every employee of Alaska Air Group.

Great book if you'd like some honest, humorous candor on Wall Street. Some of the items he addresses have hopefully been cleaned up, but many of the products created while Michael was on Wall Street on the 1980's caused the problems of 2008, so it was very interesting to hear about the origins. He does a nice job of breaking down what can be complicated financial topics for even an investing novice. Overall, very entertaining and you'll learn some important lessons.

I picked this up based on the enjoyment I got out of reading "Moneyball". Michael Lewis is a very good author, whose prose flows nicely, whose characterizations are memorable, and whose sense of humor is keen. This is the story of Lewis' job working for Salomon Brothers in the 1980's. If you are interested in Wall Street history or even getting a better understanding of the issues involved in the stock market problems in the late 1980's Lewis makes the topic fun and accessible. My biggest problems with the book were that is you wanted the history lesson, you could find a much more concise resource, and if you wanted a great story, you could find better ones, not constrained by the bounds of an author's experience. All in all, this is a decent read but pales in comparison to "Moneyball" and, I have heard, "The Big Short".

If you're looking for an insider's view of investment banking in the mid 1980s - then this is the book for you.

If you're interested in the history of mortgage backed securities and junk bonds - then you might find something of interest here.

If you're interested in what Salomon Brothers got up to in the 1980s - then you should check this book out.

If you work in investment banking - then you have probably already have read this book.

If you have dealings with investment bankers - then you should read this book.

Easy-to-read; ironic; engaging and entertaining. Trading floors aren't quite like this anymore but that's only because things are (a little) more PC these days.

Two thumbs up.

A good story of what life was like at Solomon Brothers in the 1990s coupled with principles for every day life
that apply anywhere:
How one speaker "won the hearts" of those who sat on on last row during trainings and by doing so had the entire audience in his pocket
The leadership style of the firm, made up of both greed and good principles:
"It is more important to be a good man that to be a good partner"

First, this book is a biography of a chapter in Michael Lewis' life. It is NOT a book about increasing your personal wealth or about Wall Street high finance.
That being said, this book is wonderfully well written, full of surprises, and the reference to the game of Liar's Poker carries well as a vehicle throughout the book. It was scary and comical to see what brokers and traders are actually doing with my money once I hand it over to them.
I am glad that Michael Lewis survived his time on in the stock market and lived to tell us all about it. I will undoubtedly reread this book some time.

While Lewis does a fine job as he writes a personal memoir of his time at Solomon Brothers in the mid-1980's, he soon loses focus of his main storyline. Lewis wanders off for three chapters to describe the creation of a home mortgage market and the personalities involved. It is as if Lewis or his editor suddenly decided that the amusing anecdotes of life on Wall Street were fine pulp, but needed to be framed in the context of historical substence in order for the book to be seen as respectable. (Ironically, Lewis's account of the rise to power of Michael Milken is more gripping, perhaps because Lewis was more directly affected by Milken's ambitions.) The evolution of equities as an investment is ignored almost completely, leaving the reader to wonder how, in the span of two years or so, the equities department of Solomon Brothers could go from "powerless" to surviving the layoffs started days before the crash of '87 to being the reason Solomon Brothers had its worst year in history. The author is inconsistent in his granting of pseudonyms or anonymity, naming a great many employees by name while protecting a chosen few. All in all, Liar's Poker is a quick, sometimes amusing account of Lewis's time at Solomon Brothers, but little more.

It's been awhile since a book has actually made me laugh rather than merely smile, it this one did about every ten pages. The author gives the impression that anybody could have done this, and in my opinion over simplifies his work; possibly more detail would have made it less readable.

I was disappointed that the footnotes were not hyperlinked from the text. When they didn't work I ignored them. I found them at the end, too late to be helpful.

What an enjoyable book this was. I am so excited when I walk through a bookstore and come across a hidden treasure. The book describes life in a Wall Street investment bank in the 80s. What's so amazing about it is that it's real and all this actually happened somewhere sometime (and probably still does). An added bonus is the education you get on certain aspects of the markets such as fixed-income (bond) trading and how the industry is always looking for new ways to confuse the average joe. If you have some time on your hands, read this book, it can't hurt and it will only take about two days.

You can neglect all the reviews and go straightly to any local bookstore to read the first chapter which describes the game "Liar's Poker". You will buy it then, I bet. It's not a trading book which I had expected, but a true story told by a bond salesman in Salomon Brothers about how bankers "stole" or sometimes "robbed" investors shamelessly. Though I still found two chapters quite boring, the rest are really interesting. Even you may not like the story, you will learn to be more careful when your private or personal banker calls you for a deal or two! Finally, I must agree with Management Today's comment that it "Should be made a legally required component of every MBA course".

worth the read if one interests in i) how MBS/CMO were created in the old 80s..ii) corporate infighting were quite common especially traders, sales, managers are cut throating each other for bonus iii) the birth of junk bond...ultimately this book was written in 1989, and interestingly the whole MBS/CDO/CDS/ABS were reappeared again during 2000-2007...yes, the subprime securitized home loans...

Having read "The Big Short" first I knew Lewis was capable of holding the reader's interest with complex financial stories and this book is no exception. I really enjoyed this book as a prequel to The Big Short. It shows how unregulated greed has caused many of the problems we have today in the financial system. Essentially, if you want to find the roots of the subprime mortgage debacle, start with this book as it traces the origins of CDO's. The book is a real page-turner and then gets a little slow near the 3/4 point. This is why I give it 4 starts. But it picks up and makes a walloping splash at the end. I highly recommend it.

Regulators who read this book would have had a clue of how to see and prevent the crisis in housing finance. I saw it coming (experience from my days in real estate), but those in charge were either blind (naive) or blinded (corrupt). That's a pity, since the government-facilitated market collapse wiped many trillion dollars off our balance sheets and still has most of the world's economies in a twisted deep hole.

A survival guide, if you will, for all prospective wall street wannabes in college. Michael Lewis is one of the only authors aside from P.J. O'Rourke who can make the inner working of economics and trading seem amusing to the average reader. While all of us have our own view and biases of the crazy trading and greed of the eighties, Mr. Lewis offers an astute and often humorous account of his experiences as a trader of bonds to clients who were as clueless as himself about what they were doing. A must read for all, not just economic gurus. Ben Stein himself couldn't give a more amusing tale of wall street.

As a fan of Moneyball and The Blind Side, I was interested to pick up this book (in its abridged audiobook form). Lewis doesn't lie about what the book is - a memoir, not a book about investment. Much like Moneyball doesn't teach you how to manage a baseball team and The Blind Side won't help you find the next Michael Oher (much less manage a Taco Bell), this book isn't meant to teach much about the profession, but more about the society. It does a good job.

This audiobook, complete with its faux-jazz chapter bumper music, captures the feel of the early 80s. Lewis turns the structure of his work into a compelling story, though like other reviewers I feel like the disillusionment toward the end becomes a bit heavy-handed. Coming in knowing what to expect from Lewis' later works, though, I got exactly what I expected: a story.

Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker is a revealing account of his days as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers, a bulge-bracket investment house. In the 1980's, bonds were in their heyday, and consequently, investment houses dedicated a big part of their operations to the almighty bond. Enter Michael Lewis. Fresh out of the London School of Economics, he relies on -- at least partly, anyways -- some chance connections to land a job back on Wall Street. Lewis has a knack for fully developing the characters that made Salomon Brothers and it is both enlightening and entertaining to revisit his life in the frenzied 1980s on Wall Street. As hilarious as Liar's Poker is, it also, in some respects, is a bit of a sobering read, knowing now how much Wall Street has disintegrated since Lewis' time at Salomon Brothers. bought this book for 1 cent (plus $3.99 shipping, of course) and it remains one of my all-time favorite books. A must read for anyone who has any interest in business/finance or anyone who wants a closer look at what life was really like as a bond salesman in the 1980s.

I came through this book saying wow wow wow all along. What a read. For someone who is trying to break into high finance I've been reading books to spur my interest in the field. And Ive read so many. But this has to be right on top of the pile for me. Micheal has a knack of explaining techie finance concepts in such a lucid engaging way.

This book describes Micheal Lewis' ascent through salomon brothers and weaves his story with that of the firms expansionary growth phase till he resigned in 1988.
Every finance junkie should snap this up

I read liar's poker on the sunday i reached my b-school campus, monday was to be my first day towards an mba. I can still recall myself laughing away in the night hoping that neighbours dont find me crazy.
Liar's poker is witty, makes sense either has you aspire to be on the street or makes you nod your head saying "I knew they are all rotten a lot". There are some who cant read beyond page 50, seriously disgusted at the mockery made of a serious bond deal.
What is great about liars poker is the queerness of the characters and the fact that the author in principle hates what he is doing yet in life loves veery moment of it, or at least aspires to. The Human Pirhana is my personel favourite..a Harvard grad and the master of ... speak...its definitely well written.
The book is not about its story, or the philosopical interpretations one may make about it..its simply a adrenalin driven story of a breed of people who thrive on risk, who leave their morals on their bed when they wake up, whose business is to play with money, whose religion is to make money on the seventh decimal place of the value of a bond...who havge guts of steel to be able to have a coffee after suffering a milion dollar loss, and ac as if nothing happenned after they make a milion..of course the do shout it on the hoot and the holler!!!
This is not a finance book, its a book about a breed of people, their life, their world, their religion, where all that maktters is how strong you are inside, how worthy a man (yes) are you, what kind of life do you want it to be...
Read it wheher you are into finance of not, it would be an enjoyable experience.

While it has been some time since I read Liars Poker it still brings a smile to my face by bringing back fond memories. What has renewed my interest and motivated me to write more of a validation than a review of Liars Poker was my current reading of one of Michaels other books - The money Culture. Having spent 42 years in municipal finance with, 23 of those years as a municipal bond analyst/portfolio manager/investment director, at a major institution I can speak with some semblance of authority. You would have to say that at various points in my career I experienced some of what he talks about. He does a nice job of pointing out the nature of characters, some of who, use to prey on unsuspecting porfolio managers. While most of his referrences are related to the corporate fixed income side, Munis had their share of thugs, thieves, but mostly honest people that were there to help you in various ways. Among the thugs and thieves are firms that are, in some cases, no longer in business. Who ever reads this book should keep in mind that the author, in citing what occured during the '80's, was in fact laying the foundation for what was and is ocurring in the capital markets during these turbulant times. Whether he knew it or not is not of material importance.

I have read a good number of books covering Wall Street in the 80's and I really think there are better books out there, Den of Thief's, Predators Ball. This book is entertaining, well written, and gives us a view we normally do not have, the traders. With the movies Boiler Room and Rogue Trader, you can see that they take from this book. I think the best part of the book is the behind the scenes, almost sub plot story of Salomon Brothers and Wall Street in the eighties.
The down side for me is that this book really just focuses on a small part of the whole 80's Wall Street, Junk Bond and M&A world. I would have liked him to have tried to captures so of the other things going on in his business t the same time and try and relate them to what he was doing. The ending is also about 10 pages too long. Overall this is an average book.

This book was a very good read but, on reflection, I did not find that much to cherish. I felt this was especially true in comparison to Lewis's other works. There's many cute phrases -- e.g. "Bankers use curses as nouns, adjectives, and verbs -- against the random hovering trainee" -- but I didn't feel that I really got a new perspective on Wall St. the way that Moneyball gave me a perspective on sports or the New New Thing gave me one on Silicon Valley.

I am told that the average tenure of a new investment banking recruit is under three years. This is mainly because they are worn our and weary. Apparently, an eighty hour week is considered a short week and anything less than showing up in the office six days a week means that you are not committed to your job. This never sounded like an attractive profession to me. I strongly suggest that if you are thinking about entering the investment banking world, or just thinking about investing, you should read LIAR'S POKER. What drives this industry to hyper-activity? Part of the answer must be that that is the way trades are made and business is done - or always has been. It's The Tradition Stall from THE 2,000 PERCENT SOLUTION, by Mitchell, Coles and Metz. The industry also suffers from The Bureaucracy Stall - lots of inefficient policies and rules, and The Communications Stall - They don't really all get the same information at the same time. Perhaps, by replacing the bad habits of investment bankers with new good habits based on totally rethinking the way this business is done (see Mitchell's Eight-Step process), they would earn more and have more fun. Now that's a 2,000 percent solution! (Solving a problem is a 100% solution. Achieving 20 times those benefits or getting there 20 times as fast, equals 2000 percent.)

Regulators who read this book would have had a clue of how to see and prevent the crisis in housing finance. I saw it coming (experience from my days in real estate), but those in charge were either blind (naive) or blinded (corrupt). That's a pity, since the government-facilitated market collapse wiped many trillion dollars off our balance sheets and still has most of the world's economies in a twisted deep hole.

A survival guide, if you will, for all prospective wall street wannabes in college. Michael Lewis is one of the only authors aside from P.J. O'Rourke who can make the inner working of economics and trading seem amusing to the average reader. While all of us have our own view and biases of the crazy trading and greed of the eighties, Mr. Lewis offers an astute and often humorous account of his experiences as a trader of bonds to clients who were as clueless as himself about what they were doing. A must read for all, not just economic gurus. Ben Stein himself couldn't give a more amusing tale of wall street.

As a fan of Moneyball and The Blind Side, I was interested to pick up this book (in its abridged audiobook form). Lewis doesn't lie about what the book is - a memoir, not a book about investment. Much like Moneyball doesn't teach you how to manage a baseball team and The Blind Side won't help you find the next Michael Oher (much less manage a Taco Bell), this book isn't meant to teach much about the profession, but more about the society. It does a good job.

This audiobook, complete with its faux-jazz chapter bumper music, captures the feel of the early 80s. Lewis turns the structure of his work into a compelling story, though like other reviewers I feel like the disillusionment toward the end becomes a bit heavy-handed. Coming in knowing what to expect from Lewis' later works, though, I got exactly what I expected: a story.

Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker is a revealing account of his days as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers, a bulge-bracket investment house. In the 1980's, bonds were in their heyday, and consequently, investment houses dedicated a big part of their operations to the almighty bond. Enter Michael Lewis. Fresh out of the London School of Economics, he relies on -- at least partly, anyways -- some chance connections to land a job back on Wall Street. Lewis has a knack for fully developing the characters that made Salomon Brothers and it is both enlightening and entertaining to revisit his life in the frenzied 1980s on Wall Street. As hilarious as Liar's Poker is, it also, in some respects, is a bit of a sobering read, knowing now how much Wall Street has disintegrated since Lewis' time at Salomon Brothers. bought this book for 1 cent (plus $3.99 shipping, of course) and it remains one of my all-time favorite books. A must read for anyone who has any interest in business/finance or anyone who wants a closer look at what life was really like as a bond salesman in the 1980s.

I came through this book saying wow wow wow all along. What a read. For someone who is trying to break into high finance I've been reading books to spur my interest in the field. And Ive read so many. But this has to be right on top of the pile for me. Micheal has a knack of explaining techie finance concepts in such a lucid engaging way.

This book describes Micheal Lewis' ascent through salomon brothers and weaves his story with that of the firms expansionary growth phase till he resigned in 1988.
Every finance junkie should snap this up

I read liar's poker on the sunday i reached my b-school campus, monday was to be my first day towards an mba. I can still recall myself laughing away in the night hoping that neighbours dont find me crazy.
Liar's poker is witty, makes sense either has you aspire to be on the street or makes you nod your head saying "I knew they are all rotten a lot". There are some who cant read beyond page 50, seriously disgusted at the mockery made of a serious bond deal.
What is great about liars poker is the queerness of the characters and the fact that the author in principle hates what he is doing yet in life loves veery moment of it, or at least aspires to. The Human Pirhana is my personel favourite..a Harvard grad and the master of ... speak...its definitely well written.
The book is not about its story, or the philosopical interpretations one may make about it..its simply a adrenalin driven story of a breed of people who thrive on risk, who leave their morals on their bed when they wake up, whose business is to play with money, whose religion is to make money on the seventh decimal place of the value of a bond...who havge guts of steel to be able to have a coffee after suffering a milion dollar loss, and ac as if nothing happenned after they make a milion..of course the do shout it on the hoot and the holler!!!
This is not a finance book, its a book about a breed of people, their life, their world, their religion, where all that maktters is how strong you are inside, how worthy a man (yes) are you, what kind of life do you want it to be...
Read it wheher you are into finance of not, it would be an enjoyable experience.

While it has been some time since I read Liars Poker it still brings a smile to my face by bringing back fond memories. What has renewed my interest and motivated me to write more of a validation than a review of Liars Poker was my current reading of one of Michaels other books - The money Culture. Having spent 42 years in municipal finance with, 23 of those years as a municipal bond analyst/portfolio manager/investment director, at a major institution I can speak with some semblance of authority. You would have to say that at various points in my career I experienced some of what he talks about. He does a nice job of pointing out the nature of characters, some of who, use to prey on unsuspecting porfolio managers. While most of his referrences are related to the corporate fixed income side, Munis had their share of thugs, thieves, but mostly honest people that were there to help you in various ways. Among the thugs and thieves are firms that are, in some cases, no longer in business. Who ever reads this book should keep in mind that the author, in citing what occured during the '80's, was in fact laying the foundation for what was and is ocurring in the capital markets during these turbulant times. Whether he knew it or not is not of material importance.

I have read a good number of books covering Wall Street in the 80's and I really think there are better books out there, Den of Thief's, Predators Ball. This book is entertaining, well written, and gives us a view we normally do not have, the traders. With the movies Boiler Room and Rogue Trader, you can see that they take from this book. I think the best part of the book is the behind the scenes, almost sub plot story of Salomon Brothers and Wall Street in the eighties.
The down side for me is that this book really just focuses on a small part of the whole 80's Wall Street, Junk Bond and M&A world. I would have liked him to have tried to captures so of the other things going on in his business t the same time and try and relate them to what he was doing. The ending is also about 10 pages too long. Overall this is an average book.

Michael Lewis knows how to tell some nice anecdotes about life on Wall Street, but after the first 20 pages, it's largely a tale of the stresses of bond trading. He does go into some detail about how the deregulations of the 1980's allowed for many interesting types of trading, but it remains largely dull for the rest of the book.
If you're looking to be entertained, a better book about Wall Street would be Bombardiers by Po Bronson. After reading both books, it's very obvious that Bronson was heavily influenced by Liar's Poker, but by being pure fiction, allows for more interesting and sympathetic characters and is far funnier.

This book was a very good read but, on reflection, I did not find that much to cherish. I felt this was especially true in comparison to Lewis's other works. There's many cute phrases -- e.g. "Bankers use curses as nouns, adjectives, and verbs -- against the random hovering trainee" -- but I didn't feel that I really got a new perspective on Wall St. the way that Moneyball gave me a perspective on sports or the New New Thing gave me one on Silicon Valley.

I am told that the average tenure of a new investment banking recruit is under three years. This is mainly because they are worn our and weary. Apparently, an eighty hour week is considered a short week and anything less than showing up in the office six days a week means that you are not committed to your job. This never sounded like an attractive profession to me. I strongly suggest that if you are thinking about entering the investment banking world, or just thinking about investing, you should read LIAR'S POKER. What drives this industry to hyper-activity? Part of the answer must be that that is the way trades are made and business is done - or always has been. It's The Tradition Stall from THE 2,000 PERCENT SOLUTION, by Mitchell, Coles and Metz. The industry also suffers from The Bureaucracy Stall - lots of inefficient policies and rules, and The Communications Stall - They don't really all get the same information at the same time. Perhaps, by replacing the bad habits of investment bankers with new good habits based on totally rethinking the way this business is done (see Mitchell's Eight-Step process), they would earn more and have more fun. Now that's a 2,000 percent solution! (Solving a problem is a 100% solution. Achieving 20 times those benefits or getting there 20 times as fast, equals 2000 percent.)

Liar's Poker, written by Michael Lewis, describes life on Wall Street during the 1980's and the four years the author worked for Salomon Brothers. Lewis discusses the evolution of the bond market, how mortgaged-backed securities came to exist, and the misfortunes of missing the junk bond market. The fantastic character portrayals are absolutely hilarious and they make the book come to life. Liar's Poker depicts many business ethics issues such as gender and race discrimination, consumer and investor protection, and hostile work environments.
Lewis begins by describing John Gutfreund, Chairman of Salomon, and the Liar's Poker game. Gutfreund is portrayed as a manager that was both feared and respected. He was once a trader and managed Salomon with a trader mentality. Traders by nature are gamblers, so they are willing to take bets, or better yet, they are risk takers. Gutfreund apparently loved playing the game, Liar's Poker, because if a person was good at it, he was probably a good trader as well. The game is played predominantly by Salomon traders whereby a group gathers in a circle holding a dollar bill close to the body to hide the serial numbers. One player begins by making a bid such as "three fives," which means that all the players in the circle have at least three fives in their serial number. The player to the left can either challenge the bid or up the bid by saying three sixes or four fives. Only in a challenge do the players reveal the serial numbers on the bill. Essentially, it is game that rewards players for their ability to bluff or deceive the other players. Lewis uses the game to illustrate Salomon's corporate culture and its leadership.
Liar's Poker does a fantastic job explaining how the mortgage trading business originated and how Salomon/Ranieri created mortgaged-backed securities. Lewis also details more stories about his escapades after the training program. The book is easy and fun to read because it is presents an accurate picture of Wall Street firms. Business ethics issues are presented through the text. The issues that are identified in this report are sexual and ethnic discrimination, hostile work environments, and unethical business practices. Many more ethical issues are present in the Liar's Poker. This book should be read by anyone hoping to join a Wall Street firm or simply a trading environment.

Wish I read this when it was first published. The book is now pretty dated, but still a good read for anyone who ever got a cold call from a broker with a good thing to sell you. I only subtracted one star because I think it could have been better with more careful editing and organization.

A somewhat tedious walk through investment banks and their penchant for commissions and profit at the expense of their clients. Arbitrage is a skill set, and goes to the informed, but not always the best salesman. I am glad that I read it, but found no real reason to hold on to the investment house chicanery.

One may have a PhD or an MBA in finance or mathematics or the sciences, and by virtue of a fat paycheck, may take oneself far more seriously. This book will put things in perspective. Tells you the real deal; and believe me not much has changed, and will perhaps never. A true kinder-garden, that requires one in some sense to have poorly integrated ego states to prevail; in short various levels of neurosis and psychosis is your advantage; a persistent sense of distorted perception of reality is needed. Here to have a psychological problem is to have a psychological advantage. As the shear irrationality of the goings-on on wall street, should cause the healthy, rational and productive minds to step away to pursue meaningful lives, such as the author himself. This is not to say all of the financial services is this way; it certainly is a core aspect of all our lives, the services part of it that is.

Read this and you would not be surprised why the financial crisis of 2008 occurred, and you will see why it will repeat again.

Liar's Poker

This is one of the finest books I've read in a while. The book kept me up many nights, knowing I'd regret it the next day, but unable to put it down. For a detailed, first-hand, insightful look at the madness and excitement at Wall Street's top bond trading firm in the 80s, this is the book to read. Even if you have only a tangential interest in the financial world, Liar's Poker will be worth your time. I read Monkey Business before this, and thought that highly entertaining. It pales in comparison to Liar's Poker, however. Highly recommended..it fully deserves its status as a classic.

Hysterical assesment of the Investment banking industry. This should be a must read of any college student wanting to make it in Investment banking. Describes in detail how millions were made very quickly by taking advantage of the stupidity, or ignorance of those with money. The author give an acurate account of the industry with out being as pretentious as you would think an investment banker would be, he is quick to tell the reader that he did make a lot of mistakes due to his own ignorance. Really a great read.

I thought this book was a fascinating truth-is-stranger-than-fiction insight into the high-powered Wall Street subculture. It is a must-read for people thinking about pursuing Wall Street jobs or CNNfn/CNBC junkies who want a behind-the-scenes look at those big investment banks you hear about all of the time. Lewis suffers from a one-sided cynicism about the people and culture of the street, but backs up his attitudes with engrossing, yet completely horrifying tales about the way 80's Wall St. traders behave.

Lewis' portrayal of people on Wall Street was spot-on. Even though the time portrayed in the book was the 1980s, traders are still the same. If you want an entertaining but accurate look at how investment banks actually work, this is your book.

I've gone back to this book repeatedly over the years. It still has the power to entertain.

A really interesting and entertaining story about finance and wall street. I really liked it.

"Knowing about markets is knowing about other people's weaknesses"

"Those who say -- don't know, and those who know -- don't say"

"Bond traders and salesmen age like dogs. Each year on the trading floor counts for seven in any other corporation."

Lewis' first book (that I know of) is a great introduction to his excellent writing style on financial topics many would otherwise find dull. Amazing insight into the beginning of the "Gilded Age" on Wall Street with deregulation leading to unfettered growth, and how no one thought to check. Much rings true today, and "Liar's Poker" is a must for anyone who enjoys Lewis's writing.

Liar's Poker is to the 80s what Frank Partnoy's F.I.A.S.C.O is to the 90s, with the notable exceptions that Liar's Poker is well written, it's funny and its author obviously understood what was going on. Where Partnoy (unwittingly) portrays himself as an impressionable geek, Lewis by deliberately painting himself that way is a disarming and likeable narrator.
If skulduggery on the trading floor is your bag, then this is the book for you - give Partnoy's feeble impression the swerve.

This book is a must for people interested in Wall St dealers. It's entertaining, but does not discuss anything in depth in terms of trading strategies. It's the story of John Merriweather, Lewis Ranieri and their crew...It gives a detailed account of who the top traders were at Soloman and where they ended up. The book is very good with describing the specific of individuals responsible for making Salomon the bond house of the 80s and 90s. This book describes how the mortgage market was invented by Lewis Ranieri who started out his career in the mail room

Lewis spins a rollicking tale around the formative years of a niche in the bond market which still exists today. Aside from simply teaching the lay person a very basic lesson in finance, Lewis gives us glimpse onto the trading floor that we may or may not want to see. Investors will shudder and those ambitious souls with iron stomachs (you'll have to read the book)will pack their bags for the city to become traders.
I originally read this book because of its relevance to my job in the asset-backed bond industry. For those just starting out in the business, it is a must read.
For anyone else who enjoys a well-written yet hilarious trip to The Street, I highly recommend Liar's Poker.

An entertaining look into the life of a Salomon Brothers bond trader in the 1980s. The book offers a cursive overview of the financial innovations during that period, but the real contribution is in examination of the culture and the personalities of the Wall Street traders. Not without some embellishment, Michael Lewis does a great job of communicating the eccentricities and absurdities of the traders - 'the big swinging dicks'. At the very least, 'Liar's Poker' is an entertaining read, at best, an insightful look at what (and who) turns the wheels of our financial institutions.

This is a book that every American should read. It explains the out of control atmosphere that Wall Street is under. I just wish I as a small business owner could easily devise money making schemes and not worry about the government coming after me for it being illegal or at least immoral.

This should be required reading analysts and associates along with `Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle' and `Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success'. Each gives a different and illuminating perspective on the ups and downs of the many different departments that make up large, institutional finance organizations. Moreover, there are in totality especially useful if you have no idea about how finance actually operates on a day-to-day basis beyond what you see in your economics courses (definitely the case at Harvard, U Chicago, MIT and the like, where these firms heavily recruit). Can definitely give those without and an internship or direct experience the ability to level the playing field to a large degree.

Michael Lewis is a profound storyteller. His writing leads you along his own experience, creating a captivating narrative, while at the same time informing you about the state of banking during the 80s. The combination leaves you with knowledge that lasts.

Lewis is an excellent writer. Very enjoyable reading. I wasn't interesting in baseball until I read Money Ball. I have read everything by him except the football book which I intend to read, hopefully for free on Prime. I am actually re-reading "The Big Short" to get even more out of it. I also suggest Kurt Eichenwald for non fiction reads.

This is the book so many others have tried to imitate, Michael Lewis's classic account of his time as a bond salesman. Like many of his imitators, Lewis has a seemingly endless supply of funny stories about his time at Salomon's bond desk during its glory days. Unlike others, however, Lewis is also tremendously insightful about what the real meaning of his job was, and what such a culture implied for the state of the American economy and culture.

Great story about one of the most powerful investment banking firms on wall street. Easy read and enjoyable. The author gives great examples of what it was like to have worked at Salomon Brothers in the 80s.

I worked for CSFB for three years, and am still in investment banking for a smaller firm. So I have seen a part of the world that is described here. I'm not saying that this is an exact description of what I saw, because Lewis picks the most exotic creatures that he met, but the atmosphere is perfectly conveyed. This book will tell you all the stuff that they don't teach you in an interview or recruitment visit - the pecking order, the politics, and how to get paid.
The other reason to read this is that Lewis is a brilliant writer, with a real talent for describing people and their situations. Lots of other people have written boring books with the same raw material. For a non-specialist like my mother, the technicalities were hard work, but you don't need a lot of special knowledge to like this book. My mother certainly did.
Probably the best way to look at this book is like a travel book - you're not visiting a country, you're visiting a world. Great travel books are not word-perfect descriptions of a place, they are representations of what the author felt like when he was there, and they give the reader a feeling of what it was like to be there. If you read this book, you will understand what it feels like to work inside a big bank, and you'll enjoy the ride, even if you have no interest in actually working there.

I picked up this book because it is highly popular among investment bankers, whose fat wallets were enough to take this book seriously. I am not an investment banker and do not intend to be one but I was keen to find out what makes Wall Street special. The book not only satisfied my curiosity but also was pleasantly amusing.

The author traces the glorious and gloomy times of Salomon Brothers, a big financial enterprise in which he worked long enough to be able to tell this tale and become a rich man. He explains some financial innovations of Salomon brother's in lay man's terms, which makes this book very readable for all.

The author's self-deprecating humor and his vivid analysis of the people he came across in his organization make the account entertaining.

Whether or not the author's opinions on technical matters in this book are meritorious-I am not qualified to say. If you are a finance novice and curious to find out about life in that universe, you will find this book worthwhile.

From Art history major to Bond trading geek at Investment Banking firm of Salomon Brothers, Michael Lewis, in a lovely, humorous way, describes his career journey - and with a lot of peppered wit and honesty. His description of his entry into the firm of the stinking rich and moderately restrained team of Bond Traders was funny, I thought. So was the description of the BSDs (Big Swinging D***) and their attitudes. There are many such instances in this great book
He describes with great detail, and often with shocking honesty, the way the Bond Trading firms then worked. In fact, I strongly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in the way Wall Street firms have worked, and the way they have earned their money, and continue to do so, Eric Spitzer or no Eric Spitzer! He writes charmingly, and the narrative is often captivating. Entertaining and Unputdownable..!!
Readers could also follow this book up with 'When Genius Failed', which continues with the story of greed and danger (and Merriwether !)

Michael Lewis has built an incredible career writing about finance, technology, innovation, sports, fatherhood, etc. Liar's Poker is a Wall Street classic that focuses on the hubris and wealth of some of the most powerful and innovative men on Wall Street in the 1980s. Read this book and learn about the titans of Solomon Brothers like John Meriwether, Lewis Ranieri, and John Gutfreund. Lewis also gives the reader a first-hand account of the immature behavior of both Senior Executives as well as newly minted Associates. You may have a difficulty believing the info in the book, but it is, in fact, true.

Liar's Poker goes down in history as the first-ever "high financial thriller" of the non-fiction variety. The first fiction thrillers were Zero Coupon (1993) by Paul Erdman and my own Lost Trust: The Great Credit Crisis (see 25-Feb-09 PR: [...] When just a kid in college, I remember my godfather giving Liar's Poker to me for Christmas, and it was the book that first got me excited to work in the institutional bond side of the business (1990-2008). Despite Michael's brilliant marketing abilities and warnings about Wall Street greed (as well as my own efforts to warn the relevant parties about subprime CDOs), we are now sadly witnessing the quick evaporation of Lewis's bond business (along with the economy). Some forces are too powerful to override.

While Liar's Poker does not explain brilliant things about Wall Street that you cannot learn from reading the news, it teaches the material in a far friendlier fashion. Lewis is able to translate his fantastic sense of humor onto paper better than most (why he was a good salesman for his short stint at Solly). As for the relevance of the book's material to the present day, there is a huge difference that many customer reviewers are missing. Lewis wrote about the creation of mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which slice and dice interest-rate-sensitive prepayment-risk. By contrast, subprime ABS tranche out credit risk, a far less forecastable and riskier event, especially with no economic data on national home price declines. Even more, the subprime ABS were packaged into my product, subprime ABS CDOs. That extra leverage from the extra layer of securitization (and the higher risk from subprime defaults vis-a-vis prepayment risk) was the medicine it took - along with absent regulation, where the Govt feigned the opposite - to blow it all up.

I picked this up off of a bookshelf at a cabin I was staying in for a week and had trouble putting it down. The section on the mortgage traders is worth the price of the book alone. "They committed acts of gluttony, the likes of which had never been seen on Wall Street before." Lewis' vivid descriptions of these guys had me rolling. Near the end he gets a bit cynical, but it doesn't take away from the rest of the story.

Who knew a story about the financial industry could be both entertaining and informative. Michael Lewis combines insight and humor into a story that on the surface would seem to be dull and boring. Certainly doesn't reassure the reader that the playing field is fair though when it comes to Wall street, but considering the events since the 80's we already know that.

Lewis puts you right there in what it was like to be on the trading floor in the 80's. From the early round of Liar's Poker, it just completely sets the tone for the rest of the book. One of my favorites.

A entertaining look at the coming of age of an ex-Salomon Brothers bond salesman in the 1980s. In many ways, his experiences foreshadow the economic collapse of the mid 2000s he documents in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.

Michael Lewis told his story and the story of the fall of Salomon Brothers just like it happened. I loved this book at the beginning and the middle, but my interest started to fade toward the end. Much of the end of the book is devoted to the fall of Salomon Brothers, just not interesting stuff.
The story itself (excluding the last few tedious chapters) is entertaining and halarious. Lewis' history with Salomon Brothers is recounted and told excellently. If you would like to get a glimpse inside a mighty Wall Street investment bank and its workings, I highly recommend this book. Only reason for four stars, I've read better....

Writing is great. Many sentences/paragraphs are structured and delivered in almost perfect condition. This is in contrast to "The Big Short" which seemed like an (interesting) stream-of-conscientious, written/recorded in a few days.

It was a good book. The story line and characters were easy to follow and you don't need to have a background in investments to understand what is going on. I recommend it to anyone with a historical interest in Wall St and especially those who are planning to pursue a career in the industry. There are lots of truths about the conflicts of interest that are a fact of life for those who work in those jobs.

The book is clearly satire, and definitely exaggerates a bit, but it still gives you a sense of the Wall Street culture, where people are extremely wealthy but also extremely unrefined (scarfing greasy cheeseburgers while making millions). Very funny. Also extremely informative on topics such as the rise of mortgage bonds and junk bonds as financial tools. The book gives a great portrayal of the genius of the people behind these financial innovations. In fact, its portrayal of people in general is very funny and memorable. One final upside: there are some books, where, if you don't read them for about a week, you have no clue what's going on anymore. This is not one of those. There are relatively few people to keep track of, and they are described so well that you can't forget them.

I would DEFINITELY recommend this book. Funny and informative, a window onto a strange culture known as Wall Street.

Liar's Poker is a funny look at life on Wall Street; especially the life of lower-level employees getting their start in the financial world. Michael Lewis uses the personal experience of his financial career in the Salomon Brothers bond program to tell the larger story of the rise and fall of the entire firm during the 1980s. Along the way he tells some funny stories and gives the reader an interesting, inside look at the fast-paced life on Wall Street. But in the end, the book starts to drag and Lewis's cynical view of the securities industry begins to get tiresome. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what a trader's life is like inside a major Wall Street firm. It is an interesting, initially humorous read that is appropriately not much longer than 200 pages in length.

This was one of the first books I ever read about Wall Street. I loved it and ultimately pursued a career in the capital markets. The trading desks are no longer the way they were back in the 80's, however, still a ton of fun.

I highly recommend reading Liar's Poker.

Sven Klein, Santa Barbara, CA

Michael Lewis told his story and the story of the fall of Salomon Brothers just like it happened. I loved this book at the beginning and the middle, but my interest started to fade toward the end. Much of the end of the book is devoted to the fall of Salomon Brothers, just not interesting stuff.
The story itself (excluding the last few tedious chapters) is entertaining and halarious. Lewis' history with Salomon Brothers is recounted and told excellently. If you would like to get a glimpse inside a mighty Wall Street investment bank and its workings, I highly recommend this book. Only reason for four stars, I've read better....

Writing is great. Many sentences/paragraphs are structured and delivered in almost perfect condition. This is in contrast to "The Big Short" which seemed like an (interesting) stream-of-conscientious, written/recorded in a few days.

It was a good book. The story line and characters were easy to follow and you don't need to have a background in investments to understand what is going on. I recommend it to anyone with a historical interest in Wall St and especially those who are planning to pursue a career in the industry. There are lots of truths about the conflicts of interest that are a fact of life for those who work in those jobs.

The book is clearly satire, and definitely exaggerates a bit, but it still gives you a sense of the Wall Street culture, where people are extremely wealthy but also extremely unrefined (scarfing greasy cheeseburgers while making millions). Very funny. Also extremely informative on topics such as the rise of mortgage bonds and junk bonds as financial tools. The book gives a great portrayal of the genius of the people behind these financial innovations. In fact, its portrayal of people in general is very funny and memorable. One final upside: there are some books, where, if you don't read them for about a week, you have no clue what's going on anymore. This is not one of those. There are relatively few people to keep track of, and they are described so well that you can't forget them.

I would DEFINITELY recommend this book. Funny and informative, a window onto a strange culture known as Wall Street.

Liar's Poker is a funny look at life on Wall Street; especially the life of lower-level employees getting their start in the financial world. Michael Lewis uses the personal experience of his financial career in the Salomon Brothers bond program to tell the larger story of the rise and fall of the entire firm during the 1980s. Along the way he tells some funny stories and gives the reader an interesting, inside look at the fast-paced life on Wall Street. But in the end, the book starts to drag and Lewis's cynical view of the securities industry begins to get tiresome. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what a trader's life is like inside a major Wall Street firm. It is an interesting, initially humorous read that is appropriately not much longer than 200 pages in length.

There's no other word to describe this book. I haven't laughed out loud this many times while reading any other book I can remember. A must read for anyone who has ever worked in Corporate America and especially the investment/finance business. A charmingly witty and brilliant inside look at the game of snakes and ladders the investment banking industry can be....

This well-written account of unbridled greed and cynicism makes me thankful I have never worked on Wall Street; These wheeler-dealers made in months what I made in an entire career as a teacher, but at least I can sleep at night. Michael Lewis's struggle to ultimately do the right thing is not without humor and the discriptions of the colleagues with whom he worked are fascinating. One omission that would have helped me, admittedly financially challenged, would have been a dictionary of financial terms.

I have a hard time deciding 4 or 5 stars for this book. Lewis paints an enjoyable and informative picture of Wall Street and the London branch of Salomon Brothers, but takes a long hiatus in the middle chapters, delving into more history and neglecting his own experiences entirely. It's the (more) boring middle chapters that rehash Wall Street's history and cause a reader to lose interest.
Lewis is at times funny, but this book is FICTION and loses some of its power when the author chooses pseudonyms or oblique references for real people in real situations. All in all, a good, easy read -- but don't expect a Salomon learning experience.

I first read this as a 21 year old straight out of college. Like many of my friends, I thought being an investment banker was the epitome of badass jobs.

I read the book, and although it wasn't praising of the industry, it actually worked in its favor. The characters (all real) seemed like rockstars. I WANTED IT.

Needless to say, I did eventually try the waters of investment banking, only to realize it isn't such a rockstar atmosphere, much as Lewis presents.

Liar's Poker provides the reader with a wonderful account of one of Wall Street's most formiddable houses being left by the wayside. Embodied in the compensation structure at the firm, Lewis' tale describes vast numbers of star employees fleeing Salomon for greener pastures. This book gives an excellent account of how a once mighty firm was driven into the ground by the haplessness of an ineffective board personified by John Gutfreund.
Without doubt, this is one fo the finest accounts of what really happens on Wall Street that one will read. It truly dives into the depths of ignorance on the trading floors where no one truly knows what they are doing or where their futures will lead them.
I fully recommend this book to anyone interested in the greed and decadence that plagued the 80s culture. For the business buff, this is a combination of humor and sadness of a once great firm that cannot and should not be missed.

The testament to this book's greatness (and it's most ironic quality) is that traders for the past 25 years have likened themselves to the guys portrayed in this book.

Instead of re-hashing why this book is awesome, I'd emphasize here that it's a great book for the economic layman to read today because it recounts the creation of the collateralized securities market in an entertaining and accurate way. If you want to know the origins of the current economic debacle (and why Lou Ranieri is oft mentioned as a culprit), this book is an ideal choice.

I enjoyed the book which gave me visuals of the dysfunctional workings of hiring, firing, and trading that takes place on Wall Street, but it read more like a fictional world that is unrelated to the average person's reality.

As soon as I opened this book, I was not able to put it down. I read it for a few hours non-stop, until I finished it. Although Wall Street has changed a great deal, since the time period described in Lewis' book, I think it is still very entertaining and informative. I only wish I read this as a freshman. The book pretty much walks you through the Wall Street culture of the 80's. I wish he knew more about derivatives, so he could get into the causes of the '87 crash. If you're thinking of working on Wall street, be it sales or trading, and haven't read this book yet, read it.