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Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street. - book reviews
Washington Monthly, Nov, 1989 by Joseph Nocera
"And I thought again. When I had a moment to reflect, I decided I wasn't so pleased. Weird, huh? This was Salomon Brothers, remember. These were the same people who had me blowing up customers with exploding AT&T bonds. They were perfectly capable of turning the same firepower on me as they used on my customers. . . . I decided, in the end, I had been taken for a ride. . . . By the standards of our monopoly money business, 90 grand was like being on welfare. I felt cheated, genuinely indignant."
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And so on. As should be clear from the above, Lewis always managed to maintain at all times an admirable degree of detachment from the culture he was mired in, not an easy task when you're 25 years old and on top of the world, jamming bonds for fun and profit. Lewis says he quit because finally, "I lost the need to make huge sums of money." ("The funny thing is," he adds, "that I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished.")
My own guess, however, is that he is being slightly disingenuous here; his ability to remain detached suggests to me that the possibility of writing about his adventures on Wall Street was always in the back of his mind. As a writer, Lewis is the real thing, as he surely must have known even as he was selling bonds with a vengeance. Not to begrudge the man his achievement, which is considerable. It is rare indeed that a writer with his flair for both the telling anecdote and "the big picture" is able to infiltrate a place like Salomon Brothers, if infiltration is, in fact, the right word. And rarer still that such a work is published at a moment like this: when the world is beginning to have its doubts about the worth of investment banking, but when the worm has not yet completely turned. Liar's Poker might be just the thing that turns the worm.
COPYRIGHT 1989 Washington Monthly Company
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