From : The Guardian
Photo : http://www.guardian.co.uk/
James Buchan on a magnificent account of financial shenanigans that cost the public dear.
Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, which came out in 1989, cast a lurid light on the Wall Street bond-trading house Salomon Brothers at its greatest prosperity in the middle of the 1980s. Salomon's traders were a mercenary army without leaders: violent, ignorant, gluttonous, avaricious and profane, treacherous to one another and their customers, and heading for a bad and unlamented end.
In this bedlam, Lewis himself was charming and obnoxious in approximately equal parts. Aware that he had been corrupted by his time at Salomon, he brags about his year-end bonus, which now seems very small potatoes. He confirmed, in peculiarly vivid style, what had long been suspected: that if modern commercial banks are not well-managed businesses, modern investment banks (apart from Goldman Sachs, about which more later) are not managed at all, and can withstand neither success nor failure.
In this bedlam, Lewis himself was charming and obnoxious in approximately equal parts. Aware that he had been corrupted by his time at Salomon, he brags about his year-end bonus, which now seems very small potatoes. He confirmed, in peculiarly vivid style, what had long been suspected: that if modern commercial banks are not well-managed businesses, modern investment banks (apart from Goldman Sachs, about which more later) are not managed at all, and can withstand neither success nor failure.
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