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Michael Lewis

Liar's Poker

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The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker.

Before there was Flash Boys and The Big Short, there was Liar's Poker. A knowing and unnervingly talented debut, this insider’s account of 1980s Wall Street excess transformed Michael Lewis from a disillusioned bond salesman to the best-selling literary icon he is today. Together, the three books cover thirty years of endemic global corruption—perhaps the defining problem of our age—which has never been so hilariously skewered as in Liar's Poker, now in a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author.
It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never before had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time. After you learned the trick of it, all you had to do was pick up the phone and the money poured in your lap.

This wickedly funny book endures as the best record we have of those heady, frenzied years. In it Lewis describes 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.

As he has continued to do for a quarter century, Michael Lewis here 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 chairmen Gutfreund challenges his chief trader to a hand of liar’s poker for one million dollars.
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366 printed pages
Original publication
2010
Publication year
2010
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Quotes

  • Leenahas quoted5 years ago
    Early on Alexander taught me the importance of a strong exterior. "I learned awhile ago that there was no point to showing weakness," he said. "When you arrive at six-thirty A.M., 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, T'm really tired and really upset.' You say, T'm great, how the hell are you?' "
  • Leenahas quoted5 years ago
    HERE DEVELOPED a pattern to our existence. Each month began with an analysis of our small unit's performance, each week with an office meeting, and each day with a series of phone calls to whoever we thought might like to roll the dice
  • Leenahas quoted5 years ago
    place their bets on the American bond market from eight in the morning until eight at night.

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