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

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The uncomfortable thing about this book is not that Wall Street was greedy. It’s that the money had come loose from any underlying competence. Michael Lewis was 24, held a Princeton degree in art and archaeology, and had never taken an accounting course or managed savings of his own. Salomon Brothers paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars over three years to tell grown adults where to put their money. Writing about it two decades later, he said the firm’s willingness to do that remained a mystery to him. The memoir is funny about the men on the trading floor, but its argument is colder than the anecdotes: an industry can pay enormous sums for a skill nobody has actually verified, and keep doing it for years, because nothing in the system is set up to check.

Michael Lewis on SummaryShelf

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