Update On Tuesday, March 1, 2016, I got a call, my banker (view spoiler)[that sounds weird, I'm not sure of the term, but the guy who looks after my account (hide spoiler)] resigned from Morgan Stanley. He said they wanted to put the commission and charges clients pay up too much and that it has become Corruption Central. He says he'll phone me when he finds a new company. Does anything change?My son who is in his last year at law school has a job already with Goldman Sachs. Is he going to becom...

In 2007, super investor Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway made a bet with some of the people over at the Protege Partners hedge fund. He wagered that over a period of ten years the S&P 500 (a passive index) would outperform a group of five hedge funds* handpicked by Protege, with the loser donating one million dollars to the charity of the winner's choice.(*Hedge Fund: A limited partnership of investors that uses high risk methods, such as investing with borrowed money, in hopes of realizing

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. So...

Atlas Shrugged for the philistine. It's subtle glorification of the greedy, underneath a veneer of hilarious sarcasm and grudging respect is the stuff financial Bibles are made of. An interesting slice of financial history is captured succinctly, more precisely the development of Collaterized Mortgage Obligations in the 80's which also has direct relevance to the recent U.S housing crisis. If you wish to get everything you can out of this book, get your Finance 101 straight. It'll be a lot more

Why am I languishing here, making approximately $0 dollars as a librarian? Why was I not a Wall Street investment banker?! These guys were having all the fun. In his introduction to the Big Short, Lewis writes that he was dismayed people took Liar's Poker not as a cautionary tale, but as a how-to manual for their careers. But I can totally understand why! He makes the trading floor sound like the place to be, the absolute center of the universe. He's also got a real knack for explaining somethin...

When a single game of Liar's Poker is played with a million dollars at stake at a workplace, just what, or whom, in the world are you dealing with? The most money-hungry industry, probably. Wall Street, ding, ding! Money is a nebulous thing, and when you start dealing in the millions, perhaps billions, over a telephone, what happens to you and your soul? When Savings & Loans managers sell out for a chance to play in the big leagues, the world slides into Pottersville. Liar's Poker makes you feel...

First book of this type I truly enjoyed. Thank you Lewis for opening up a new field of book to explore.

pp 83 is a discussion of S&L's failure in the US.pp 136 is the best explanation of CMO's I've ever read.Great read. Initially loaned to me by a coworker. I went out and bought it shortly thereafter.A former art student winds up becoming a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers in the mid 1980's. He sees a lot, and describes it vividly. Chernobyl. The October Crash of 1987. Gutfreund and Meriwether quibbling over how much to bet in one hand of the title game.He introduces some terms to the lexicon th...

To write a non-fictional portrayal of your life during your 20s is not an easy task. To do this while still in your 20s, to have it be your first book, and to have the story revolve around bond trading / Wall Street - and not have the book be as dry as it sounds - seems an almost cruel undertaking. But Lewis managed to do this. Despite what would seem to be the worst idea for a first book, Lewis keeps the reader interested and turning pages, even with a cast of execrable people that are only mad...

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.

Thank Jeebus and Gutfreund this early book was successful because it is hard to imagine experiencing this last bear market without the funny, clear narrative genius that is Michael Lewis.

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...

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 s...

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. Ind...

This is the author's narrative of his experience working at Salomon Brothers, at one time the biggest investment bank on Wall Street and probably the world. The book is a sarcastic look into the world of high finance with wit and humor laced in the narrative. Investment banks are generally known as the hotbed of high net worth employees who sell products (equities, debt, bonds and mortgages here) to gullible, often clueless, investors at huge profits to satisfy their ever-increasing appetite for...

4.5 StarsA thrilling account of investment banking. The bottom line is don't do it lmao.