Liar's Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and the fictional The Bonfire of. Michael Monroe Lewis (born October 15, 1960) is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. Posts about Liar’s Poker written by gselevator. Now that my book is available for pre-order, I wanted to quietly make a few things clear. Author: Michael Lewis. Signed contracts with Goldman Sachs and Simon & Schuster, and paid lawyers more than I made. Author of STRAIGHT TO HELL (not about @gselevator or Goldman.

Liar's Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s.^[1] First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and the fictional The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. The book captures an important period in the history of Wall Street. Two important figures in that history feature prominently in the text, the head of Salomon Brothers' mortgage department Lewis Ranieri and the firm's CEO John Gutfreund.

The book's name is taken from liar's poker, a high-stakes gambling game popular with the bond traders in the book.

Overview[edit]

The narrative of Liar's Poker jumps back and forth between two different threads.

One thread is autobiographical: it follows Lewis through his college education, his hiring by Salomon Brothers (now a subsidiary of Citigroup) in 1984, and his training at the firm. It is a first-person account of the personalities, workplace practices, and culture of bond traders. Several high-ranking Salomon Brothers employees of the era, such as arbitrageur John Meriwether, mortgage department head Lewis Ranieri, and firm CEO John Gutfreund, feature prominently.

The book's other thread gives an overview of Wall Street history before focusing on the history of Salomon Brothers particularly. This thread is less dependent on Lewis' personal experience and features quotes drawn from interviews. It is primarily concerned with how the Salomon Brothers firm almost single-handedly created a market for mortgage bonds that made the firm wealthy, only to be outdone by Michael Milken and his junk bonds.

Biographical section[edit]

Lewis was an art history student at Princeton University, who wanted to break into Wall Street to make money. He describes his almost pathetic attempts to find a finance job, only to be roundly rejected by every firm to which he applied. For example, in 1982 Lehman Brothers had rejected his employment application. He then enrolled in the London School of Economics to gain a master's degree in economics.

While in England, Lewis was invited to a banquet hosted by the Queen Mother, where his cousin, Baroness Linda Monroe von Stauffenberg, one of the organizers of the banquet, purposefully seated him next to the wife of the London managing partner of Salomon Brothers. She hoped that his intelligence might impress her enough for her to suggest to her husband that Lewis, be given a job with Salomon Brothers. The strategy worked, and Lewis was granted an interview and subsequently received a job offer.

Lewis then moved to New York City for Salomon's training program. Here he was appalled at the sophomoric, obtuse and obnoxious behavior of some of his fellow trainees, and indoctrinated into the money culture of Salomon Brothers and the Wall Street culture as a whole.

From New York Lewis was shipped to the London office of Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman. Despite his lack of knowledge, he was soon handling millions of dollars in investment accounts. In 1987 he witnessed a near-hostile takeover of Salomon Brothers but survived with his job. However, growing disillusioned with his work, Lewis quit the firm at the beginning of 1988 to write this book and become a financial journalist. The first edition was published October 17, 1989.

Wall Street culture[edit]

The book is an unflattering portrayal of Wall Street traders and salesmen, their personalities, their beliefs, and their work practices.

During the training sessions, Lewis was struck by the infantilism of most of his fellow trainees. Examples included yelling at and insulting financial experts who talked to them, throwing spit balls at one another and at lecturers, calling phone sex lines and then broadcasting them over the company's intercom, gambling on behavioral traits (such as how long it took certain trainees to fall asleep during lectures), and the trainees' incredible lust for money and contempt for any position that did not earn much.

Lewis attributed the bond traders' and salesmen's behavior to the fact that the trading floor required neither finesse nor advanced financial knowledge, but, rather, the ability and desire to exploit others' weaknesses, to intimidate others into listening to traders and salesmen, and the ability to spend hours a day screaming orders under high pressure situations. He referred to their worldview as 'The Law of the Jungle.'

He also noted that, although most arrivals on Wall Street had studied economics, this knowledge was never used; in fact, any academic knowledge was frowned on by traders.

Lewis also attributed the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s and 1990s to the inability of inexperienced, provincial, small-town bank managers to compete with Wall Street. He described people on Wall Street as masters at taking advantage of an undiscerning public, which the savings and loan industry provided in abundance.

Catch phrases[edit]

• Big Swinging Dick — A big-time trader or salesman. ('If he could make millions of dollars come out of those phones, he became that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick.' p. 56.) The opposite of this term is Geek, used to refer to a just-hired trainee.
• Equities in Dallas — A particularly undesirable job within a finance firm. ('Thus, Equities in Dallas became training program shorthand for 'Just bury that lowest form of human scum where it will never be seen again' p. 58.)
• Blowing up a customer — Successfully convincing a customer to purchase an investment product which ends up declining rapidly in value, forcing the client to end up withdrawing from the market.
• Feeding Frenzy — The Friday-morning meal shared by a certain clique of bond traders. At this meal, traders would order astounding quantities of take-out food, far more than they could eat (e.g., a five-gallon tubs of guacamole with an order of $400 worth of Mexican food). The traders would then compete with each other to see who could display the most gluttony.
• The Human Piranha — Nickname for an employee ^[2] at Salomon Brothers who constantly used the word 'fuck' and its variants in his speech. A reference to Tom Wolfe's character in The Bonfire of the Vanities.
• No Tears — Used to describe a preset alternate rule Michael Lewis describes in the book, John Gutfreund challenges John Meriweather to a game of liar's poker, in which he states 'no tears' which means players of the game who lose can't complain about losing afterwards.

Reception[edit]

Despite the book's quite unflattering depiction of Wall Street firms and many of the people who worked there, many younger readers were fascinated by the life depicted. Many read it as a 'how-to manual' and asked the author for additional 'secrets' that he might care to share.^[3]

See also[edit]

• Lewis, Michael, The End, Condé Nast Portfolio, December 2008. Written by Lewis, this cover story can be read as the epilogue or wrap-up of Liar's Poker.
• David, Greg, 'The Securities Industry and New York City'^{[permanent dead link]}, Financial History, Museum of American Finance, Spring/Summer 2009.

References[edit]

1. ^Lewis, Michael, Liar's Poker, W.W. Norton & Company, 1989. ISBN0-393-02750-3. 'Archived copy'. Archived from the original on 2009-05-01. Retrieved 2009-05-25.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
2. ^'The Human Piranha' is said to be Tom Bernard[1] who ran trading businesses for Salomon Brothers, Kidder Peabody, and Lehman Brothers for twenty-eight years on Wall Street.
3. ^ Simon Johnson and James Kwak, '13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown', (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), p. 113-114 'citing' Michael Lewis, 'The End' 'Portfolio,' Dec. 2008

External links[edit]

• Liar's Poker (book details) - The Official Michael Lewis Website

by Daniel Davies 15 July 2020

One of the superpowers of some top investment bankers is the rare ability to keep their mouth shut. While there’s a place for charismatic figures and great salespeople, plenty of clients prefer someone who keeps out of the limelight and solves their problems. Someone who, on rare occasions when they have to speak to the press, obeys the old rule, “whatever you say, say nothing”. Steve Mnuchin, the current U.S. Treasury Secretary and the subject of a long profile in the current New Yorker, is clearly out of that mould.

The profile is fascinating in its own way, because Mnuchin is clearly an extremely interesting guy. The son of revered block-trading boss Rob Mnuchin, he interned for Lewie Ranieri in the “Liar’s Poker” heyday, then made partner at Goldman in nine years, where he was to some extent a protégé of Lloyd Blankfein. By 2002, he had become the Chief Information Officer (in the days when that didn’t necessarily require an engineering background), at which point he left to join Eddie Lampert in the notoriously controversial transactions in the restructuring of Kmart and Sears. By the time of the financial crisis, he’d effectively predicted the rise of Netflix and set up his own investment group to buy the film library from Dreamworks – he ended up being part of the group that financed “Avatar”. The list of high-risk transactions in glamorous industries, nearly all of which appear to have been successful, continues; he even spotted the ultimate deep value, black swan, fat tail investment by being an early political backer and fundraiser for his current boss Donald Trump.

Liar's Poker Goldman Sachs Marcus

So why is it, apparently, that whenever Mnuchin sat down for an interview with Sheelah Kohlatkar, he came out with an extraordinarily soporific stream of Davos clichés? You’d expect a former bond trading hedge fund guy with a sideline in Hollywood to at least curse a bit, and preferably to be constantly buzzing with controversial wisecracks. It might be that Mnuchin was on the defensive, and well he might be given that the New Yorker also dug into his past as the “Foreclosure King” of working class housing in California. But even politicians usually say something candid, by accident if not design. Mnuchin is even possibly the only person ever to say that although he likes Ayn Rand’s novels, he isn’t really interested in her political philosophy.

This is presumably why he has survived so long at the top level of the U.S. Government, when superficially more substantial financiers like Gary Cohn have been forced out. You don’t necessarily have to admire everything that Steve Mnuchin has put his name to, but even his sternest critics seem to admit that his coronavirus support program was well executed, and that not many other people could have got it through. Much can be achieved by someone who doesn’t care all that much about getting the credit.

Elsewhere, a filing in a separate case of attorney fees has given a rare insight into the secrets of hedge fund arbitration tribunals and of Bridgewater’s legendarily tough non-compete agreements. The panel’s decision, as summarised, doesn’t sound that great for Bridgewater – it says that the company “fabricated evidence, withheld evidence and disregarded its own records”. It’s not clear which of the Principles governs conduct in cases with departing employees, or if it was followed in this case, but the panel’s ruling seems to have been based on a decision that the “trade secrets” which Zachary Squire and Lawrence Minicone were alleged to have stolen were in fact “generally known to professionals in the industry”. Bridgewater apparently continues to believe that the arbitrators got it wrong.

Goldman Sachs Bank

This could potentially be good news for Bridgewater in the long term. Currently, some people are reluctant to work for them, precisely because of the risk that if it doesn’t work out, you might find yourself severely restricted as what you can do next. If a perception grows up that you’ll only really be prevented from starting a business if there are real and substantial issues of intellectual property, that could make it easier to make the move. But that all depends on whether Bridgewater gets more realistic about how much control it can expect - Mr Squire and Mr Minicone were tied up in litigation for two years, despite having backers as prestigious as the family offices of Alan Howard and Mike Novogratz.

Meanwhile …

An article in the New York Times gives the names which were redacted from the Deutsche Bank settlement with the DoJ. To be honest, this story leaves something of a sour taste. The Deutsche fine was for failures of systems and controls, not for any involvement in Epstein's crimes; at the time, he had served his sentence and was being welcomed back into society by institutions significantly more socially prestigious than any investment bank. Are we next going to get a list of the names of all the law enforcement officials who didn't follow up the case, all the individual staff of galleries and universities who took his donations and, indeed, all the journalists that didn't publish stories until he was safely dead? (NYT)

One might not have thought there were more interesting details to come out of the Barclays/Qatar/PCP litigation, but in cross-examination yesterday, Roger Jenkins suggested that his wife, Diana, had been jealous of Amanda Staveley, and consequently he had exaggerated her role in making introductions to the Qatar royal family in internal memos. (FT)

We also discovered exactly what it was that former Barclays exec Stephen Jones had said about the PCP team that was so bad he had to resign from lobbying group UK Finance (Guardian)

As the article says, a sign of how much things have changed; trans model Munroe Bergdorf and “Lady” Phyll Opoku-Gyimahl gave a round-table presentation to Macquarie Group bankers in London at a joint meeting of their LGBT and BAME networks (Pink News)

In the old Goldman Sachs tower in Jersey City, WeWork will be taking 110,000 square feet of space and turning it into a new coworking space (The Real Deal)

Adrian Lewis, HSBC’s head of EMEA ECM, is retiring, but it won’t create a vacancy – Andrew Robinson, the current head of syndicate, will be adding the title to his responsibilities. (Global Capital)

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)

Photo by Pablò on Unsplash

Liar's Poker Goldman Sachs Wealth Management

Related articles

Liar's Poker Goldman Sachs Marcus