Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
ISBN:9780140143454 read summary

Combine, free flowing money, a self-centered culture, and Wall Street's contempt for common moral structures, and you end up with unbridaled greed. From the top down you hear "Take the customer or client for all you can." "The measure of the person is the size of his bonus." This book has helped me truly understand the culture and the liturgy of the New York investment banking world and is a metaphor for what is eroding American society today. It is a wonderful eye opener.

This book was nowhere near as good as all the five star reviews led me to believe. The writer offered some amusing commentaries, but as a whole the book was quite dull. There are no great revelations nor uncommon insights. Instead, Lewis spends half the book descriping events of which he admits he had no firsthand knowledge.
Not a horrible book, but it is very lightweight and doesn't deeply penetrate any of its topics. If you are looking for an amusing, easy-to-read day in the life account of a Wall Street trader, you may enjoy it. Anyone looking for a more hard-hitting account of the era should check out "Predator's Ball" or "Den of Thieves"

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This is a must read if you want insight into how Wall Street thinks, and you get to learn a little about Mortgage Backed Securities and Collateralized Debt Obligations. Michael Lewis has the unique gift of taking complex subjects and making them understandable and funny.

What is clear from this book, as well as Gasaparino's "The Sellout", is that Derivatives (under Congressional scrutiny right now) and MBS's are not the problem, they are the symptom. Wall Street will simply think of new products to bring in more suckers; that's how the game is played.

Beyond a lesson in Wall Street's antics, this is a fun book to read. Michael Lewis is an entertaining writer, as evidenced by his success as a writer. Highly recommended.

I came through this book saying wow wow wow all along. What a read. For someone who is trying to break into high finance I've been reading books to spur my interest in the field. And Ive read so many. But this has to be right on top of the pile for me. Micheal has a knack of explaining techie finance concepts in such a lucid engaging way.

This book describes Micheal Lewis' ascent through salomon brothers and weaves his story with that of the firms expansionary growth phase till he resigned in 1988.
Every finance junkie should snap this up