Liar's Poker (Norton Paperback) Paperback – March 15, 2010

A hilarious and grimly realistic look at the world of investment banking - as true today (2011) as it was in the 1980s when originally written. This should be required reading for anyone who has ever thought they could beat Wall Street at its own game - in other words, a cold-blooded reality check for those poisoned by the fumes of the "get-rich-quick" myth.Although an autobiography detailing the author's career with Salomon Brother's in the 1980s, it also serves as an informative study on the turmoil that rocked the markets in the 1980s that resulted in a major change in investor focus from the stock exchange to the bond market - and it is this that set the stage for the infamous crash of 1987 as well as the problems we face today with the mortgage bond market. It all started here.Lewis pulls no punches with frank commentary or his brutal prose: he has no problem ripping aside our comforting illusions of the investment world and is equally ready to turn his dagger against himself as well as against his former colleagues. He puts to rest the myth that 'anyone can get rich doing this' - advice that many former 'day-traders' of the 1980s probably wish they had heard at the time. True, if you know what you are doing you can likely make money - but that requires a twenty-four/seven commitment to keeping an eye on the entire market - not just stocks and bonds but the dynamics driving the industries behind them - which very few can do without quitting their day jobs. He shows the results of the dark side of the market - the consequences of losing triple your original investment - and how hard it is to avoid this. The odds are definitely stacked against the casual investor. Best summary of all this information: don't do it.This book also is an excellent business case study about what happens when a firm suddenly finds itself out of its familiar territory and makes no provisions or changes to deal with it. Consider the fact that we have an investment bank doing business in Europe - that has no idea who the European banks are! (Yes, you'll find that in the text). Or management that refuses to concede that their perfect plan has nothing to do with the business reality. Or, worse, that the lowest members of the hierarchy are able to see instantly that a firm, the most profitable on Wall Street at the time, is doomed to fail. It does.Readers who are offended by the use of uncensored language would probably do well to steer clear of this work - Lewis does not make any attempt to tone-down either the facts or the language used by the players. He does not offer a positive spin on the risks involved in the investment game and he makes it clear that all players need to be careful about assuming how much their advisers really have their best interests at heart. This is all to the good - this book is all the more striking because of this.Definitely a must-read for those who have ever considered taking on the market or for those who desire a clearer understanding of what exactly goes on in the world of Wall Street. It isn't comforting - nor should it be. But at least if a person still feels able to take on the windmills after reading this warning, they will be making sure that they aren't the fool in the market.

LIAR'S POKER is one of those memoirs that immerse you in something far greater than one person's experience. It immerses you in a time and a place that were unique and spiked with all those base qualities of human nature: greed, arrogance, pomposity, (the list goes on). The vision he paints of Salomon Brothers in the mid 1980s is a contemporary verse pulled right out of Dante's Inferno.Lewis begins his career in high finance with a chance (hilarious) encounter with a S. Brothers partner's wife at a charity reception hosted by the late Queen Mother. What follows is a descent into a highly lucrative fraternity house where every pledge is initiated into a hyper-macho, hyper-greedy arena. S. Brothers as described by Lewis is a brutal landscape populated by obese, obscene tribes vying for dollars.For those of us who have read Lewis's more recent books, his debut memoir lacks one quality that his other volumes have - crystal clarity. LIAR'S POKER attempts to clarify the opaque, complex world of bond trading but the effort gets mired in jargon and wonk. I found my eyes glazing slightly at some of the internecine battles that emanated from convoluted bond schemes.This is a great book to read thirty years after it was written because it traces the birth of a Wall Street we've come to know. Reading about the men who first came up with novel ways to convert mortgages into bonds is like reading the private musings of a young Lee Harvey Oswald. It's eerie. Other scenes involving Lewis's dismay at the habit of S. Brothers disregarding the well-being of clients in the pursuit of revenue are troubling and completely unschocking in a current context. The practice of major investment banks of subverting client interests to bank interests is now well-documented. Only days ago, Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs executive, published his Op-Ed in the NY Times decrying the culture of greed over relationships within Goldman. Smith's op-ed could have been written by Michael Lewis in 1987.LIAR'S POKER may be one of the most misunderstood books. To hear aspiring financiers express their love of this book is to hear someone who has seemingly missed the point. It's odd that someone would read this book and see it as inspirational. Did they not read the epilogue where Michael Lewis decides to walk away from untold riches because he sees there's little personal value in his job as a bonds salesman, where he questions the entire social value of a job that turns money into more money, where monotony and viciousness is rewarded with a minor heap of gold?To the young people vying for the life described in LIAR'S POKER, I say good luck.