Michael Lewis

From mere trainee to lowly geek, to triumphal Big Swinging Dick: that was Michael Lewis' pell-mell progress through the dealing rooms of Salomon Brothers in New York and London during the heady mid-1980s when they were probably the world's most powerful and profitable merchant bank. A true-life Bonfire of the Vanities, funny, frightening, breathless and heartless, his is a tale of hysterical greed and ambition set in an obsessed, enclosed world.

Liar's Poker

Aske Dørge

"Those of us in housing felt the market was charging us more of a premium for the prepayment risks than the real value." Think about the way that sentence is put. Who are "Those of us in housing"? Ranieri himself wasn't charged. Lewie Ranieri, formerly of the Salomon Brothers' mail room and utility bond trading desk, had become the champion of the American homeowner. It was a far more appealing persona than that of the slick, profiteering Wall Street trader. "Lewie had this spiel about building homes for America," says Bob Dall. "When we'd come out of those meetings I'd say, 'C'mon, you don't think anyone believes that crap, do you?' But that was what made Ranieri so convincing. He believed that crap”

What was happening - and what is still happening- is that the guy who sponsored the float in the town parade, the 3-6-3 Club member and golfing man, had become America's biggest bond trader. He was also America's worst bond trader. He was the market's fool.

a few months out of a training programme, who happened to know more about Ginnie Mae 8 per cent IOs than anyone else in the firm. That a newcomer to Wall Street should all of a sudden be an expert wasn't particularly surprising, since the bonds in question might have been invented only a month before. In a period of constant financial innovation, the youngest people assumed power (and part of the reason young people got rich was that the 1980s was a period of constant change).

A geek is a carnival performer who bites the heads off live chickens and snakes, Or so says the red American Heritage dictionary.

It was widely believed that a small bald man in a grubby room in Moscow started all rumours to wreak havoc on our Western market-based economy. The rumours bore an uncanny resemblance to whatever people feared most.

The law of the bond market is caveat emptor. That's Latin for "buyer beware".

The embodiment of the takeover market is a highly strung, hyper-ambitious twenty-six-year-old, employed by a large American investment bank, smiling and dialling for Companies. And the process by which a takeover occurs is frighteningly simple- in view of its effects on community, workers, shareholders and management. A paper manufacturer in Oregon appears cheap to the twenty-six-year-old playing with his computer late one night in New York or London. He writes his calculations on a telex, which he sends to any party remotely interested in paper, in Oregon or in huving

Hundreds of not particularly innocent victims were crushed in the avalanche of misery.

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