Liar's Poker (Liar's Poker #1) Paperback | Pages: 256 pages

Particularize Appertaining To Books Liar's Poker (Liar's Poker #1)

Title	:	Liar's Poker (Liar's Poker #1)
Author	:	Michael Lewis
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 256 pages
Published	:	October 1st 1990 by Penguin Books (first published 1989)
Categories	:	Nonfiction. Business. Economics. Finance. History. Biography. Autobiography. Memoir

Description Supposing Books Liar's Poker (Liar's Poker #1)

In this shrewd and wickedly funny book, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake's progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick, the most dangerous beast in the jungle, a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars' worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.

With the eye and ear of a born storyteller, Michael Lewis shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. In the Salomon training program a roomful of aspirants is stunned speechless by the vitriolic profanity of the Human Piranha; out on the trading floor, bond traders throw telephones at the heads of underlings and Salomon chairman Gutfreund challenges his chief trader to a hand of liar's poker for one million dollars; around the world in London, Tokyo, and New York, bright young men like Michael Lewis, connected by telephones and computer terminals, swap gross jokes and find retail buyers for the staggering debt of individual companies or whole countries.

The bond traders, wearing greed and ambition and badges of honor, might well have swaggered straight from the pages of Bonfire of the Vanities. But for all thier outrageous behavior, they were in fact presiding over enormous changes in the world economy. Lewis's job, simply described, was to transfer money, in the form of bonds, from those outside America who saved to those inside America who consumed. In doing so, he generated tens of millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers, and earned for himself a ringside seat on the greatest financial spectacle of the decade: the leveraging of America.

Be Specific About Books In Favor Of Liar's Poker (Liar's Poker #1)

ISBN:	0140143459 (ISBN13: 9780140143454)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	Liar's Poker #1

Rating Appertaining To Books Liar's Poker (Liar's Poker #1)

Ratings: 4.15 From 77047 Users | 2134 Reviews

Crit Appertaining To Books Liar's Poker (Liar's Poker #1)

This book surprised me. I read and enjoyed Lewis' Moneyball a while back, and thought I was getting another journalistic account, this time of a crazy moment in corporate culture. Instead, it's very much a memoir of that world. And I didn't care for it at first, since the group of people he writes about are so spectacularly awful. He brings a certain world of investment banking trainees home to you, and I wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the whole book, I don't think I could take it.

In a previous review, I talked about The Bonfire of the Vanities and about the mastery of Tom Wolfe in crafting his characters, the story line and the various social types he described there. There was one aspect of that book that I did not talk much about and yet which was prevalent in my attraction to the story: not only it is one of the iconic stories that symbolizes Wall Street in the 1980s but it is also taking place at a very specific time when Wall Street was actually part of History.

As always, a compulsively readable book from Michael Lewis. I knew that this would further indulge my distrust and resentment of Wall St. and it did just that. Also this was eerily prophetic with its explanation of the inception of mortgage backed securities and judgement of unsustainable finance strategies. Probably one a very few finance books that will make you laugh.

The last line is probably the funniest/most ironic line I've read all year.

I'm a little torn by this book. It's well written, it's funny in places, some of Michael Lewis' observations are very astute and I'm sure that on some level this is an excellent commentary on the downfall of a once great company. Lewis was a trainee bond trader at Salomon Brothers when that firm was the most profitable on Wall St. He did very well out of his time there, and his analysis both here and in another of his works, The Big Short, pinpoints several of the problems that society has, or

Probably the least interesting thing by Michael Lewis that I've read. Billed as an expose of Wall Street greed, I found it more to be a story of incompetent management and political infighting by conceited executives who found themselves successful by being in the right place at the right time, but think themselves as geniuses. Some of this reminded me a lot of my father's stories of the politics at his former law practice. Why anyone would want to work in a place with so much backstabbing and

21 years after publication, Liar's Poker feels both relevant and ancient. Relevant because it seems the Big Swinging Dicks of Wall Street are ever with us; ancient because of references to things like WATS lines and the lionizing of Salomon Brothers trader John Meriwether, whose Long-Term Capital Management would spectacularly implode in 1998, and Michael Milken, who apparently had not yet been indicted when the book went to press but got a 10-year prison sentence for securities violations.Lewis