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    Unavailable
    Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
    Unavailable
    Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
    Unavailable
    Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time.

    In this shrewd and wickedly funny audiobook, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake's 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-a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars' worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.

    A born storyteller, Michael Lewis shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. The bond traders, wearing greed and ambition as badges of honor, might well have swaggered straight from the pages of Bonfire of the Vanities. But for all their outrageous behavior, they were in fact presiding over enormous changes in the world economy. Lewis's job was to transfer money, in the form of bonds, from those outside American who saved to those inside America who consumed. In doing so, he generated tens of millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers, and earned for himself a ringside seat on the greatest financial spectacle of the decade: the leveraging of America.

    Editor's Note

    High-stakes game of deceit…

    Lewis’s first book chronicles his time going from trainee to bond trader extraordinaire at Salomon Brothers during one of the greediest times on Wall Street. A hilarious cautionary tale that remains all too relevant today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 18, 2007
    ISBN9780739357316
    Unavailable
    Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

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    Reviews for Liar's Poker

    4/5

    1,133 ratings38 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Finished this on the plane to Rio. Definitely know more about mortgage bonds, bond trading, and Wall Street in the 80s than I did before. I felt three stars represented how much enjoyment I got out of the book, but considering that the subject matter is of about 1 star of interest to me, I cannot really imagine enjoying any book on this topic more, so maybe it deserves more stars.
    • 5/5
      The more things change, the more things stay the same. So much of what I thought was novel or curious about Wall Street in the 1990s and 2000s was right there in the early 1980s, same as ever.

      Also, Michael Lewis is unequaled at the art of turning numbers into human drama.
    • 4/5
      Wow! If you don't already hate Wall Street bankers (or investment bankers where-ever they may be based), read this book to revive your sense of revulsion. Indicative of zero sum game our society has descended to.
    • 4/5
      Probably Lewis's best book.
    • 5/5
      Michael Lewis is an excellent writer. He completely draws you into the scene with detail and description and leads you along well paced journey to understanding the world of wall street with it's characters and events. A true insider's tale. Parts of the book are funny and doesn't lose you with the mechanical aspects of the markets and how big corporates function. Some regard this as required reading if you work in the industry. I wouldn't disagree.
    • 5/5

      I am a big fan of Michael Lewis so it is hard for me to be objective in a review but I do think this book is brilliant.
      Personally I have not ready a better book that sums up the greed and gluttony of 1980's Wall Street.
      One thing that I found fascinating, especially with our recent financial collapse and history to compare and contrast, is that this book so clearly shows that as smart and as slick as some people can be in their quest to get rich in the financial markets ultimately Wall Street is simply one big giant casino and the people that work there are for the most part simply gamblers.
    • 2/5
      I write this review with the caveat that I am neither a financial-bonds-market type of person, nor am I interested in reading dry non-fiction.

      I have heard this book described of as "funny" and "entertaining", but to be honest, I never found it to be either in any way.

      The author was a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers, and gave great insights into how the bond markets work, what happened in the 80s and, most interestingly, into the culture at Salomon Brothers. While the culture of the company was most interesting to me, I still had a very hard time finishing this book, and at no point did I find anything amusing or entertaining about the book. I'm sure it was more interesting to people more familiar with the financial sector.
    • 4/5
      Not quite what I thought it would be but one has to give Lewis credit for great humor and an ability to make the arcane readable. His descriptions of high finance make complete sense, which is hard to do, while simultaneously carrying an implicit criticism of the inherent illogic behind them. While this is not of the caliber of Moneyball, The New New Thing, or The Big Short, it's still a very good book and well worth a few days of reading. (If Lewis is taking you longer than that then there's a problem.)
    • 5/5
      A brilliantly written and closely observed dissection of the mentality of bond traders in the years before they nearly brought down the world's financial system. A must read.
    • 3/5
      The first book I read in flipback format was Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker (Hodder & Stoughton, 2011). Not the sort of thing I'd generally pick up, but I wanted to try out the format and the book proved well worth the reading. Funny, but also absolutely scary in the way it portrayed Wall Street culture of the late 1980s from the perspective of a bit-player in the drama (Lewis as a twenty-something employee of Salomon Brothers).
    • 3/5
      The book covers the short career of Michael Lewis as a Salomon Brothers trader during the 80's. Excellent incite into the financial workings of Wall Street. It is also a bit scary that this mentality is behind the financial structures of the world.
    • 3/5
      fairly interesting view of life for a city trader
    • 3/5
      What is it like to be a trader on Wall Street? What is the difference between Wall Street and Main Street? Well, this is the book to read. Michael Lewis takes one through step by step on how he got hired, how he was trained, and then what was it like working for Salomon Brothers. Oh yes, I need to mention the background was the downturn of the market in the 80's. An excellent book.
    • 4/5
      Liar's Poker is a clever autobiography / biography of life at Solomon Brothers. The characters that populate the book are mad and brilliantly rendered by Lewis. At times it is laugh out loud funny, and Lewis obviously had mixed feelings about his time at the firm. He talks about the power of money with real knowledge, and the technical parts of the book are easy to follow but not dumbed down. Lewis expects the reader to understand which is refreshing. The echoes of the recent economic downfall of Wall Street are all too evident, and reading it now gives the book a funny sadness. It told me that life is more often about luck than judgement, and that luck is never ever permanent.
    • 3/5
      Well written description of bond trading madness.
    • 4/5
      Extremely engaging (and witty) account of two years at Solomon Brothers on the eve of their downfall in 1987. To me the most surprising thing about reading in 2010 this 1989 book was how much of the 2008 financial crisis could be understood in terms of the dynamics clearly described 20 years earlier (i.e. that crises are essentially inevitable when operators move faster and have much clearer incentives than regulators). Also interesting the ethnic analysis of various trading tribes at Solomon and the constant (dishonest) appeals to firm loyalty by those most likely to betray it.
    • 4/5
      Reading it, I was thought it was a brilliant, funny encapsulation of the "greed is good" 80's ethos. Then I realized that once you adjusted the numbers for inflation, this book could have been written in 2008. That put a damper on things to say the least.
    • 4/5
      This was published in1989, but the story seems so relevant to 2009 that I wonder if we've learned anything. Lewis was at Salomon Brothers during the mid-80's, a time when the firm's astute traders created opportunities with clients and found even bigger opportunities through the federal subsidization of mortgage bond risk. Starting as a very atypical trainee, he succeeded and within a few years became the top performer of his class. Along the way, he observed the breakdown in corporate character (and the complete abandonment of decorum) that would eventually lead to the demise of Solomon Brothers as an independent entity. The few admirable characters Lewis knew were lost in a crowd of opportunists, some of whom only worshiped money (a god whose name they would not speak), and others who seem to have worshiped money, food, and condescension in equal portions.The tale would be depressing if it weren't for the hopeful ending. Lewis was self-aware throughout his experience, and he ultimately walked away at the peak of his earnings. The bond market corrected its own inefficiencies as competitors turned big spreads into small ones, and the imprudent risk takers eventually found themselves on the wrong side of the market. No matter what he contributed to his clients' portfolios, Lewis has definitely contributed to our understanding of business and the ugly circumstances that occur when motivation is unchecked by character.
    • 5/5
      The closest thing to the definitive account of high finance yet. Although the fact it hasn't been bettered in the last fifteen years says a lot about the relative attractiveness for BSDs of making money vs. writing about making money...
    • 4/5
      Excellent read for anyone interested in Trading
    • 5/5
      Amusing memoir of attaining great wealth on Wall Street in the '80s.
    • 4/5
      great book. lewis is a good writer. this holds up.
    • 5/5
      classic read for anyone who's thinking about finance. does a good job explaining financial concepts (such as MBS). very entertaining.
    • 5/5
      What a great book! I actually learned more about the real market from this book than some regular investing book.
    • 5/5
      A good description of a trading company and what goes within. Some of the sections on employee management are relevant to all industries. Derisking and keeping ahead of the market are important for organization sustenance... Complacency being a killer. This is brought out quite well with the narrative.
    • 4/5
      Shorter book but Michael Lewis always delivers. Great character driven book with himself as the main protagonist working his way up Wall Street in the 80’s.
    • 2/5
      Terrible narration. Should have a professional voice artist to record the audio book instead.
    • 5/5
      what Can I say it is Michael Lewis, one of the best story tellers.
    • 2/5
      Repetitive. Not nearly as entertaining as his other books.
    • 5/5
      A classic of financial history, and a minor classic of humour. Lewis in part tells a history of the bond market in the 1970s and 1980s, and in part, a personal history of his time selling bonds in London for Salomon Brothers, one of the leading bond firms of its era. Lewis is quite sharp in showing how Salomon, through mistakes in management and culture, lost its leading position in the bond markets (more or less, blowing through its intellectual capital). There's also a great deal of hilarity in the caveman culture of Salomon of the era (well, it'll be hilarious to you if you're not a Bernie Bro). Lewis' style is very engaging, and he doesn't spare himself in a few just areas. The title is inspired, in that you can read it literally, in the game that Lewis describes, or in general, as to the way Salomon operated. Definitely recommended for students of financial history, and in general recommended.