Liar’s Poker - game over, man! Game over!
November 29th, 2008 by frederickiiI’m a little late to the party on this one, but Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker (and later, Moneyball), has written an entertaining and informative obituary of Wall Street as we’ve known it. From the preamble, in which he reflects on the book that made him famous:
I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”
