Book review: Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street

Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street
by Michael Lewis

David's Review:4/5

As part of my research into investment banking I just finished reading this book. It is an insider view of Solomon Brothers investment banking firm during 1980s in the midst of dramatic a evolution of ibanking industry. Michael Lewis gets hired into the firm as a junior analyst and describes his life from the 7 months training program up to the day that he quits the firm. Although the book does not go into too much technical details of the investment banking work itself it describes clearly the mindset and the lifestyle of ibanker. It is great story full of conflicts between interesting characters that epitomize arrogance, smartness, opportunists with killer instinct.


Here is an interesting quote from the book:

“Andy Stone from Prudential explains the managerial problems at Salomon and the rest of Wall Street: “Wall Street makes its best producers into managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often neurotic and paranoid. You turn these people into managers, and they go after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that producing gave them. They usually aren’t well-suited to be managers.Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get muscled out because of politics. The guys left are just the most ruthless of the bunch. That’s why there are cycles on the Wall Street, because the ruthless people are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.”