More than 30 years later, Michael Lewis’ 1989 book “Liar’s Poker” is still the book to read if you really want to understand Wall Street. “Liar’s Poker” tells the story of Lewis’ experience as a bond seller in the 1980s.
“I wrote my first book more than three decades ago. It was part of memoirs and part of reportage,” Lewis said.
He is revisiting “Liar’s Poker” with an audiobook and a complementary “Other People’s Money” podcast. Lewis visited the former Federal Reserve Bank building in San Francisco to reflect on the book that changed his life. He wrote about his experience at CBS Mornings. Read his essay below:
The book affected a kind of nerve in our culture. I mean, I didn’t even know culture had nerves. He had never done it before. I had no idea what to expect. The book reached the top of all bestseller lists and held for a year. And I immediately noticed something strange. I thought I had written a book that put Wall Street in its place. I thought that any 20-year-old who was contemplating a career on Wall Street could read my book and decide to go and do something more deeply enriching. This is not what happened. During the first few months, I may have received a thousand letters from people, mostly young men, saying, “I love your book, my friend! Now I’m totally excited about going to work on Wall Street. ho. a? ” What I thought of as a warning story turned into an instruction manual.
That’s when I learned that writers simply write books. Readers decide what the words mean.
Then I thought “Liar’s Poker” marked the end of a special period of financial madness. I mean, I was a 25-year-old art history guy who knew very little about money, and yet adults paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to move large sums of money. I thought I was just documenting the end of an era of absolute madness on Wall Street. But it turns out that this era was just the beginning of something bigger: Wall Street was taking on a growing share of the U.S. economy. Of people on Wall Street who live by one set of rules and most others who live by another.
I moved on after writing the book. I never read it again. But I’ve written a couple more books on Wall Street. And I know that the world described in “Liar’s Poker” has changed. Wall Street used to be full of wired and shouting phones and big hairy men. It was crude and rude and socially unacceptable. Wall Street has now been silenced; its most important sound is the hum of a stack of computer servers. People are more careful not to draw attention to themselves.
I think that’s the main reason people still read my book. Why, for example, Wall Street inmates are assigned homework. Because he had had the last vision of the great beast before he fell back into his cave. And I accidentally wrote something that lasted.
I recently learned that the rights to Liar’s Poker audiobooks had been returned to me. So I decided to reopen Liar’s Poker and re-record it all. It was a really weird experience, almost like meeting a different self. In fact, it was difficult to read that book again. But it reminded me of the value of not always moving forward. To take the time to stop and come back.
I tossed everything about “Liar’s Poker” to a couple of bankers ’boxes and left them locked in a storage unit for decades. After recording the audiobook, I pulled out those boxes and looked inside. There was another self in there: a boy who for a long time couldn’t even see a decent book title looking him in the face. But also a guy who knew he had a good story ahead of him.
And I had to admire his strange decision to leave behind a large pile of money to write a book that he thought could change the world, even if it didn’t change the world the way he hoped.
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