Total Page : 304
Publisher : Hodder Stoughton
Publication Date : 2006 06 05
>> Terrific portrait of 1980s Wall Street before the MBAs arrived
If you want to know what the big Wall Street bond firms were like before the MBAs took over this is the book It s a great portrait of 1980s Wall Street the way that traders and investment bankers used to appear in the eyes of the young MBAs they hired and the ridiculous training that newcomers received It s not a pretty picture but if you want to know what happened recently you have to remember that the current mess happened when a different group was in charge That group included Michael Lewis s peers the well educated affluent Ivy Leaguers who run Wall Street today and took the places of the BSDs Lewis s term meaning big swinging well you get the idea The current mess was also created by the banks who were just beginning to enter the market in the 80s
Engaging as it is studying Liars Poker to understand today s Wall Street is like studying the Carter Administration before the Reagan administration privatized a thousands of governmental operations to find out how federal government really works Who were the BSDs that Lewis describes In 1975 a white man and you had to be both with smarts and a recent degree in any subject from a state college could get a job at a bond firm by using connections Connections were everything This guy s boss probably did not have a college degree The college degree jobs went to stock brokers and private and commercial bankers The key talent for 1970s traders on the way up was the ability to crunch numbers very quickly without pencil and paper By 1985 with talent and nerve the bond trader who had started ten years before could be making millions for himself and for his firm
This guy was the BSD that Lewis describes And this guy hired the MBAs who were only beginning to have a foothold when Lewis worked at Salomon
Michael Lewis tells the engaging story of how a talented MBA joined Salomon Brothers and was simply astonished by the culture What he describes isa culture where a formal education takes a back seat to chutzpah Lewis s descriptions of uneducated but astonishingly rich men doing things like meeting the Queen Mother in England are hilarious
What Lewis cannot tell you because the book was published so long ago is how Wall Street replaced those guys with men and women who look and sound like Lewis Salomon once a firm of 7000 headed by its founder is now part of Citigroup The BSD s with their coarse language huge lunches and cigars have been replaced with highly paid MBAs who know exactly what looks bad on an expense report would know what to say to the Queen Mother Is this better Well it s different
I worked on Wall Street at big banks and at Salomon before and after the change
The typical BSD that Lewis describes couldn t get a job on today s Wall Street The Liar s Poker portrait of the gross uneducated cigar smoking overweight middle aged trader is something that every firm makes it a point to avoid Firms hire young people emphasis on young with fantastic academic backgrounds and Hollywood good looks Traders today are still mostly male and white but they come from affluent highly educated backgrounds The firms hire more women and minorities from the best schools so while the numbers still show mostly white men the annual report pictures and the EEOC audits go better Sexual harrassment which was rampant in the 80s still happens as it does everywhere but because of huge lawsuits firms have HR departments that will come down on any employee includng traders like a ton of bricks if the firm s money or reputation are put at risk
The current Wall Street mess wasn t created by Liar s Poker crowd Trading with computer models was something few understood Today s trader is tied to his computer and Blackberry and there is no assistant to enter the tickets There are no tickets to be hidden or manipulated By the early 90s the BSD s described in this book older men with their lightening fast calculations street smarts nerve and passion for the game had all but been replaced by Harvard Yale and Wharton MBAs
When this book was written the Mortgage Backed Securities Market was just taking off Most banks were still holding their loans on the books not selling them bundles Fannie Mae still thought it was part of the government and hadn t gone completely off the reservation It was the Michael Lewis s peers the ones who did not get out when he did along with a myriad of other people involved in mortgages and credit who caused the current mess
The BSD s do make a good target though
>> Boring if work in the industry
If you a dying to work in the industry or imagine the stock market to be a big mystery this book might be more engaging
Personaly I found it a little boring and hard to get through I am not impressed by the stories at all and found it like listening to a sales person in a bar
>> Extremely fast shipping to Peru
I was impressed about how fast this item was shipped to and actually received in Peru
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