Liar's Poker

Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, published in 1989, is a firsthand account of his time as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980s. The book takes its title from a bluffing game played with dollar bills, in which traders call out serial numbers, a fitting metaphor for a Wall Street culture built on confidence tricks and calculated risk. Lewis joined Salomon Brothers after Princeton and the London School of Economics, initially as a trainee, and rose to sell mortgage-backed securities during the era when the firm dominated the bond market. The narrative is structured in two parts. In the first, Lewis describes the surreal training program, where trainees were pitted against one another in mock trading games and indoctrinated into the firm’s aggressive ethos. The second follows his time on the trading floor, offering vivid portraits of figures like John Gutfreund, the firm’s CEO, and Michael Milken, the junk-bond king at Drexel Burnham. A central episode involves Gutfreund challenging trader John Meriwether to a single hand of Liar’s Poker for a million dollars, a scene that crystallizes the reckless bravado of the era. Lewis also documents the rise of mortgage-backed securities, explaining how Salomon Brothers’ traders helped transform home loans into tradable instruments, a development that reshaped global finance. His argument is that the bond market’s success bred hubris and obscured risk, themes that later resonated during the 2008 financial crisis. The book remains a seminal insider critique of Wall Street excess, combining memoir, reportage, and dark comedy to show how a culture of gambling and one-upmanship became institutionalized.