Weekend Link Roundup – Vol. 41 (Feb 25-26, 2017)

Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

by Michael Lewis

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker. This wickedly funny book endures as the best record we have of those heady, frenzied years. In it Lewis describes his own rake’s progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick, the most dangerous beast in the jungle, a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars’ worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.