Liars Poker (25th Anniversary Edition): Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liars Poker. Before there was Flash Boys and The Big Short, there was Liars Poker. A knowing and unnervingly talented debut, this insiders account of 1980s Wall Street excess transformed Michael Lewis from a disillusioned bond salesman to the bestselling literary icon he is today. Together, the three books cover thirty years of endemic global corruptionperhaps the defining problem of our agewhich has never been so hilariously skewered as in Liars Poker, now in a twentyfifthanniversary edition with a new afterword by the author.It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never before had so many twentyfouryearolds made so much money in so little time. After you learned the trick of it, all you had to do was pick up the phone and the money poured in your lap.This wickedly funny book endures as the best record we have of those heady, frenzied years. In it Lewis describes his own rakes progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick, the most dangerous beast in the jungle, a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.As he has continued to do for a quarter century, Michael Lewis here shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. In the Salomon training program a roomful of aspirants is stunned speechless by the vitriolic profanity of the Human Piranha; out on the trading floor, bond traders throw telephones at the heads of underlings and Salomon chairmen Gutfreund challenges his chief trader to a hand of liars poker for one million dollars.