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Better Late…: A Review of Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street has to be the first book about the mortgage crisis that the United States is going through. I say this with some confidence, because it was first published on October 1, 1990 . Yes yes, 18 years ago, but I swear to you it is the most coherent explanation of mortgage securities, and what can go wrong with them, that I’ve seen. The author, Michael Lewis, was a trainee at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980’s, just when these securities were invented, whole cloth, by a savvy trader on Salomon’s trading floor.

Oddly enough, I picked this book up almost two years ago on a lark; Lewis’ more recent books (Moneyball
and The Blind Side , both economics/sports books) had been enjoyable reads, so I snagged his first book, used, on a lark. It turns out that his first career out of college was in finance, and so his first book was a memoir-ish look back at his time at Salomon Brothers , just in time to see it spiral into its death throes.

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18Nov2008 | John | Comments Off | Continued