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Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (平装)
by Michael Lewis
| Category:
Bond trading, Investment banking, Wall Street, Financial markets |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 138.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Poisonously insightful, hysterically funny, Liar's Poker should be required reading for all moving to the Wall Street and all investors. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 11 items |
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Heather Fougnier, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
Michael Lewis writes a very interesting, funny account of bond trading in the eighties. While I often like to escape in fictional novels when I read, this memoir of Lewis' experiences on Wall Street are entertaining enough to keep me coming back for more.
While some reviewers found his technical descriptions of mortgage backed securities, junk bonds, etc. a bit boring, I enjoyed learning more about the various investment options and how they got started. Lewis definitely gives you an inside look at the tricks and deception that could be used by the financial services industry - hoping that we "suckers" will be prompted to buy enough to make them the big bucks.
And that's the point of the book - this game is all about making money for the trader and their employer, screw everyone else. Lewis includes hints about how the money and reputation as a "Big Swinging Dick" is enough to overcome any feelings of guilt about "blowing up" companies or clients (the nickname alone tells you about the lack of women in the industry).
I also enjoyed learning about how traders see the world - and how fear is what really controls the market. If you understand fear, you become a great seller of bonds or equities. In fact, Lewis makes it clear that no one can really predict how the market will go. The most successful people in the industry are portrayed as being either great salesmen or having a true (though rare) understanding of the big picture effects of a causative event (in other words, how people react based on fear after an event).
There is a deeper message here too, if you are reading closely. Michael Lewis decided that trading his conscience for making money was not for him. He felt that he and others in his profession were reaping benefits "out of all proportion" to their value in society. He makes no attempt to change the reader's views on the right or wrong of the system - he lets us judge for ourselves.
Anyone working for a financial services company - especially if you are in an unrelated part of the business - should read this book. It offers great insight on what can seem like perplexing aspects of the company culture. And if you don't work for a financial services company, you would still be better off reading this book, if only to learn how not to be a "sucker" for the financial gain of a "Big Swinging Dick." |
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K. Fenrich, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
Liar's Poker is a personal account of life at Wall Street's most successful firm in the 1980s: Salomon Brothers. The novel follows the wild roller coaster ride that was Salomon Brothers; from their ascension to the top of the mortgage-backed securities market led by the charismatic Lewis Ranieri to their eventual descent into Wall Street mediocrity. The author, Michael Lewis, chronicles his personal experiences starting with Salomon's frat-like trainee program and following his career across the Atlantic to the London offices of Salomon Bros. Along the way he describes the competitive, cut-throat atmosphere of bond trading at Salomon and fills in spaces with a variety of colorful, charismatic characters.
One character that stood out to me was the "father of securitization" Lewis Ranieri. Ranieri, a college dropout, got his start in Salomon Bros mailroom in 1968 and managed, in 10 years, to become the head of their Mortgage department. At the time the rest of Salomon Bros looked down their noses at Ranieri and his blue collared group of mortgage traders. Their department made less money and was comprised of fat, obnoxious, loud traders. Lewis Ranieri personally traversed the country selling the idea of MBS to investors and politicians and ultimately lobbying in Washington D.C. His hardwork paid off as he created a market and made Salomon Brothers hundreds of millions of dollars. His hardwork and success was paid back by Salomon when they fired him in 1987. Such a shame.
Back to the story though... Lewis's retelling of the raucous, juvenile attitudes that purveyed at Salomon is hilarious. Certain portions of the book get a bit too technical when Lewis over-explains stock market intricacies. Unfortunately some parts read like a textbook. I almost put the book down about halfway through due to the boredom I found reading the ins and outs of junk bonds, MBS and other trader jargon.
Thankfully I didn't put the book down. I perservered and was rewarded with an engaging, enjoyable second half of Liar's Poker which focuses on Lewis's evolution from trading floor "geek" to his final status as the ultimate trader, a "Big Swinging Dick." Excellent book whether you're into the stock market or not. Lewis isn't the world's greatest writer, but he certainly gets the job done. |
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Therosen, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
Liar's Poker takes the reader through the Go-Go era of Wall Street in the 80s, where banks expanded rapidly and ethics seemed to take second priority to making piles of money. (The more things change, the more they stay the same)
Three big stories are at play here. First is the creation of the Mortgage Backed Securities business at Solomon. Creating this market generated a ton of money on the street, and also highlighted both the challenges and gains from creating a new business from scratch. It also demonstrated the knives pulled out in both stopping a new business from starting, and then fighting for scraps of credit.
The second story is of junk bonds - a vehicle initially created to fund less creditworthy companies, but eventually used to finance corporate takeovers. This is the Michael Milken Drexel Burnham story. This was the other major move of finance in the 1980s, though in reality junk bonds are not as awful as the hype surrounding them. (Providing financing to less creditworthy companies is still a very valuable activity, and many funds did very well on this.)
The third story, and perhaps the most important, covers the conflict of interest between banks and their customers. Many banks, traders and salesmen take their customers long term best interest to heart. This is not neccessarily a given, and Lewis highlights his own experience in trying to walk the line.
Liar's Poker has earned it's place as required reading for all moving to Wall Street. It should also be required reading for investors. |
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C. Magee, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
Michael Lewis launched his successful career as an author with his book Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, which is both a youthful memoir and a journalistic look at the inner workings of Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street firm that grew fat trading bonds and then crashed and burned. The book takes place, roughly, between the years 1984 and 1987, and so I wasn't surprised that the book reminded me of the movie Wall Street - just replace Gordon Gecko with Salomon's head John Gutfreund. At the beginning of the book, Lewis has just been hired, quite unexpectedly, by Salomon, and he takes us through his trajectory at the company, from the cut-throat training process to his days as a bond trader in London. From this vantage point, Lewis was able to watch the company, emboldened by spectacular success in the 1980s, become a symbol of corporate gluttony. Along the way, Lewis profiles many of the company's outsized personalities. He also delves into the intricacies of the bond market in such a way that the arcane becomes pretty readable. The book is also filled with anecdotes about the conspicuous consumption of those times and the raucous, inelegant trading floor, filled with foul-mouthed traders who threw phones and insults and reveled in their gluttony. Lewis' revelation was that the company (and its competitors) made profits at the expense of its customers, and, while the period that Lewis chronicles is interesting in its own right, its impact is somewhat diminished by the many corporate scandals and Wall Street improprieties that have occurred since the book was first published. Against this backdrop, Liar's Poker is no longer an exceptional story that defined an era, it is merely another moment in the cycle of Wall Street corruption and ensuing retribution that continues today.
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Mike Brady, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
This is a superb ,blow by blow, in the trenches,account of how the capital markets of the USA are organized and function on a day to day basis.In chapter 12 of the General Theory(GT},Keynes correctly categorized the financial markets as a game of Old Maid or Musical Chairs,where the goal is "...foreseeing changes in the conventional basis of valuation a short time ahead of the general public"(Keynes,1936,p.154).Wall Street speculators" are concerned,not with what an investment is really worth to a man who buys it "for keeps",but with what the market will value it at,under the influence of mass psychology,three months or a year hence"(Keynes would have said three minutes or three hours if he were writing the GT today)(Keynes, pp.154-155).The capital,financial and stock markets are not organized to maximize long run net present value,but very short run net present value.The markets are essentially based on a short run ,short sighted,pennywise poundfoolish approach that does not maximize long run economic growth and welfare.Keynes's views were the direct result of his extensive hands on experience in operating in such markets himself over a forty year period.The potential bookbuyer is urged to read this book simultaneously with chapter 12 of the GT. |
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Mohan, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
If you want a book that allows you to dream about the good old days where money was in plenty, attitudes rained supreme, and traders made big bets calling each others bluff, then this book is for you.
These times may not come back for a very long time, but it is in some ways parallel to the dot-com days in its exceptional nature of being out of the ordinary with a wealthy aroma in the air. Brokerage firms as described in Liar's Poker still have much of the same personalities, although cut throat competition has made it a much different landscape and not nearly as profitable as it once was. Still, if you work in the financial services sector, this is a good book to get back to the roots of the more mature bigwigs in your office that still have their moneyclips. |
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Vincent Poirier, Japan
<2006-12-24 00:00>
This is the author's coming of age story, set in the world of investment banking in the 1980s. As a growth and wisdom book, it's pretty good, but it's really a non-fiction version of Tom Wolf's Bonfire of the Vanities. Of course what makes it interesting is that Michael Lewis came of age by successfully trading bonds for Solomon Brothers.
Among other aspects of the firm, LP describes Solomon's Mortgage Bonds department, its influence over the savings and loans, and the effect of Fed Chairman Paul Volker's 1981 decision to let interest rates float. Lewis does a brilliant job of explaining how this lead to S&L's selling their mortgages in order to fund investments in higher yield securities.
Here's the catch: Liar's Poker appeared before the S&L debacle but it laid out all the signs needed to predict the disaster to come.
Much of the hand wringing over S&Ls in the early 90's could maybe have been avoided if the warnings given in this book had been acted upon. To be fair, the warnings are clear but they are implicit. Lewis never actually projects the current state of the S&L industry into the future, even if he does mention that the basic problem with mortgages (short term funding of long term loans) is not solved.
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Craig Matteson, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
This is a great book. A home run. While I am not an industry insider, I did read it while I was getting an MBA from the Michigan Business School and enjoyed it a great deal. It provided a great deal of background to what I was learning in various finance classes. Mr. Lewis helped me see the people who make these markets work and move and that it isn't faceless formulas free of emotion finding perfect prices; rather it is ambitious men (and women) ferociously and sometimes crazily pursuing their own financial interests.
The book is amazingly funny without being slapstick. There are some amazing images - not only the Meriwether games of Liar's Poker, but the food being delivered to the physically rotund mortgage bond traders, the bond trader who felt like the price would rise and then kept buying billions of dollars in bonds to prove himself right. I loved reading about the training he received and what he was taught about selling bonds and how those folks really do view their customers. Some of the institutional stuff is a bit dated (but still valuable as history), but the human stuff still rings fresh and true because people and still, well, whatever it was they were back then.
If you just want an entertaining read - read this book. If you want to read about the early go-go years in the bond trading and the pre-boom boom years on Wall Street - read this book. If you want to learn about some of the big names in finance and what they did - read this book. You get the idea. I am saying you should read this book and you will be glad you did. Really.
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A reader, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
Michael Lewis's ten-year-old account of his two-year stint as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers has become a literary classic in the world of finance, and has probably stroked aspirations in more Wall Street-bound MBAs than any other book. I know many an individual who, after reading the book, become so enamored with the culture described therein that they take it upon themselves to act like the "human piranha" or any of the other clownish characters from the book.
Having worked on Wall Street in various client-facing capacities over the years, especially as a trader with a volatile fund, I feel the book is a bit over melodramatic and over-sensational. Are there such personas on Wall Street? Absolutley. In fact the real people on Wall Street - the traders, the whiteshoe i-bankers, the jewish deal-makers and deal-breakers - can be even meaner, nastier than Lewis describes. But the clownish characters he creates are probably more fiction than real. Still, his observation that most traders have huge egos and are among the most despicable human beings (despite their MBAs, Ph.D.s, or MDs) to ever walk on earth, is deadly accurate. The constant politicking is captured vividly by the author, although, again, his writing seems to border on fiction quite often.
Don't take me wrong; I think this is a must-read for anyone interested in how Wall Street breathes and works. Lewis does a fine job at exposing the disgusting nature of greed, the only thing that feeds Wall Street's daily existence.
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Jason Adams, USA
<2006-12-24 00:00>
Lewis is articulate, insightful, cynical, and hilarious in his analysis on the rise and fall of Investment Banking at Solomon Brothers during the 1980s. Liar's Poker is a brilliant portrayal of Wall Street during an era of unprecedented greed and arrogance. Until the early 1980s, equity traders were the most revered people in the industry. However, unforeseen circumstances, largely spurred by the highly leveraged Savings & Loan industry, led to the innovation of new types of financial derivatives. Essentially overnight, a new market for bonds was created for speculators and commercial banks. Volume and profits soared on the bond trading floor, and from that point on the bond traders were the "big swinging..." of investment banking.
So, against the backdrop of billion-dollar deals and million-dollar salaries enters Michael Lewis, Princeton Art History major and unlikely protagonist. His depiction of the Fraternity-like culture of investment banking is laugh-out-loud, I wish I had thought of that, funny. Lewis reaches rare form in describing the Solomon mortgage traders, a group of fat, mean Italian men with street smarts and a dislike for Ivy League MBAs and every other group within the firm.
Nonetheless, Liar's poker is more than just funny-it's insightful. Lewis combines personal narrative and investigative journalism to present a fresh perspective on the collapse of Solomon Brothers. He argues that Solomon's superiority complex resulted in a failure to react to the changing trends in the industry and the retention of key personal. This book is a quick read and a lot of fun. I wouldn't list it as a reference in an academic publication but it's a great addition to the bookshelf.
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1 2 | Total 2 pages 11 items |
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