Liar's Poker
Fresh out of Princeton, Michael Lewis landed at Salomon Brothers in 1984 and got a front-row seat to the wildest, greediest era in Wall Street history. Within three years, he rose from clueless trainee to bond salesman raking in millions. This is his hilarious, shocking insider account of how it all worked.
Welcome to the trading floor where frat-boy antics collide with killer instincts and fortunes are made in seconds. Where grown men gamble millions on bluffing games with dollar bills. Where "Big Swinging Dick" is the highest compliment and morals are checked at the elevator.
Lewis pulls back the curtain on Salomon Brothers during the bond market explosion of the 1980s. He introduces you to legendary figures like mortgage bond pioneer Lewis Ranieri and CEO John Gutfreund. You'll witness the creation of the mortgage bond market that would eventually lead to the 2008 financial crisis.
But this isn't just a book about finance. It's about the culture of excess, the absurdity of greed, and what happens when smart young people discover they can make outrageous money by taking advantage of an unsuspecting public.
First published in 1989, Liar's Poker became the definitive book about Wall Street in the 1980s. It launched Michael Lewis's legendary career and remains as entertaining and relevant today as the day it was written.
Interesting Facts
An Art History Major Cracked Wall Street: Michael Lewis studied art history at Princeton and initially got rejected by every investment bank he applied to. He landed his Salomon Brothers job through pure luck at a Queen Mother dinner where his cousin seated him next to a managing director's wife.
Published Just Weeks Before the 1989 Crash: The book hit shelves on October 17, 1989, perfectly capturing the peak of 1980s excess just as that era was ending. It became an instant classic about greed and dysfunction.
It Defined An Era: The book is considered one of three works that captured Wall Street in the 1980s, alongside Barbarians at the Gate and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities.
The Game Uses Dollar Bills: Liar's poker is played with dollar bill serial numbers. Players bid on how many of a particular digit appear across all bills in the circle, bluffing and raising until someone calls their bluff.
Training Class Was Ruthlessly Competitive: Salomon Brothers selected 127 trainees from over 6,000 applicants. Despite being chosen from elite programs, trainees threw spitballs at lecturers, broadcast phone sex over intercoms, and gambled on how fast colleagues would fall asleep during training.
Academic Knowledge Was Scorned: Despite most Wall Street arrivals having studied economics, Lewis noted this knowledge was never used on the trading floor. Traders actually frowned upon academic expertise.
Friday Feeding Frenzies Were Real: A clique of bond traders held Friday morning meals where they ordered absurd quantities of takeout, like five gallon tubs of guacamole with four hundred dollars worth of Mexican food, competing to display the most gluttony.
The Book Accidentally Recruited More Bankers: Despite the book's unflattering portrayal of Wall Street, many young readers treated it as a how to manual. They asked Lewis for additional secrets about breaking into finance.
Lewis Worked Just Three Years at Salomon Brothers: He rose from trainee to bond salesman in just three years at Salomon Brothers, handling millions of dollars in investment accounts despite his lack of financial knowledge. In his final year, Lewis received the largest bonus of anyone in his training class. But he grew so disillusioned with exploiting clients that he quit at 27 to become a financial journalist.
The Book Launched A Career: Liar's Poker was Lewis's first book and launched his career as a bestselling author. He went on to write Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short.
Quotes
"The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa." - Michael Lewis
"It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people’s behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive." - Michael Lewis
"The f*ckin' frogs are getting their faces ripped off." - The Piranha
"I learned awhile ago that there was no point to showing weakness. When you arrive as 6:30am, having had no sleep the night before, and having lost your best friend in a car accident, and some Big Swinging Dick walks over to your desk, slaps you on the back, and says, ‘How the hell are you?’ you don’t say, ‘I’m really tired and really upset.’ You say, ‘I’m great, how the hell are you?’" - Michael Lewis
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. —Sun-tzu" - Michael Lewis
"Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market." - Michael Lewis
"I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning." - Michael Lewis
"Those who say – don’t know, and those who know – don’t say." - Michael Lewis
"Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid." - Michael Lewis
"The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything." - Michael Lewis
"Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince" - Michael Lewis
"Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places." - Michael Lewis
"It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time." - Michael Lewis
"Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London." - Michael Lewis
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