Michael Lewis, who wrote Liar's Poker, had an interesting piece recently:
The End
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. ...
...When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.
Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened. ...
...In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?
His bloomberg columns are worth reading, as well. The guy knows his snark.
Anyway, he's here on a book tour for "Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity," a collection of essays on the topic from the last few decades. It either "wins the Perfect Timing award" or is "out of date before it's published," depends. After all, "misery loves company, but $27.95 is a high price to pay for the newly destitute." (psst, newly destitute: we still have these things called 'libraries,' unless they're broke, too... but you can always hang out at Borders with your voluminous free time and put the book back on the shelf when you're done with it.) Publisher's Weekly has a detailed review ("but readers seeking serious solutions to our current woes will be disappointed"), but I prefer, unusually, the publisher's info:
A masterful account of today's money culture, showing how the underpricing of risk leads to catastrophe.
When it comes to markets, the first deadly sin is greed. Michael Lewis is our jungle guide through five of the most violent and costly upheavals in recent financial history: the crash of '87, the Russian default (and the subsequent collapse of Long-Term Capital Management), the Asian currency crisis of 1999, the Internet bubble, and the current sub-prime mortgage disaster. With his trademark humor and brilliant anecdotes, Lewis paints the mood and market factors leading up to each event, weaves contemporary accounts to show what people thought was happening at the time, and then, with the luxury of hindsight, analyzes what actually happened and what we should have learned from experience.
As he proved in Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, and Moneyball, Lewis is without peer in his understanding of market forces and human foibles. He is also, arguably, the funniest serious writer in America.
Somehow, that just amuses me. Masterful and brilliant, that's the guy. Dunno about his publishers -- I've seen at least four different publication dates, from several weeks ago to next month. Well, it'll eventually turn up, I suppose.
And Borders has an excellent Chai. Also curl-up-friendly seating upstairs, if you don't want to pay rent on the table space.
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