Liar's Poker

I have read this book a lil while ago and found it amazing.Since I had borrowed this one from my friend,so I though about writing a review sprinkled with excerpts from the book itself,so that I can refer to it anytime.

Since it will take some time before I am able to cover the entire book,I will keep posting about it in installments.
Here goes the first one (the remarks in italics are mine) :-

Liar's Poker describes an era almost two decades old but it still exudes the charm and doesn't lose its relevance in the present day scenario.Michael Lewis,the author, worked in an Wall Street I-bank firm called Salomon Brothers and he describes his rise through the ranks in the company as well as the tumultuous times that Wall Street witnessed in the 80's.
As he himself puts up in the preface "That was somewhere near the center of a modern gold rush.Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did in this decade in New York and London."

Never Mention Money,p18 - Here Lewis describes the miserable job of an I-bank analyst.There is a parallel between the nature of the job of an Analyst of the 80's and a software engineer in service industry in the 90's and beyond.I cannot validate,however, if the analysts job still reeks of the same smelly and disgusting things.
p23,"Analysts didn't analyze anything.They were slaves to a team of Corporate financiers,the men who did the negotiations and the paper work of new issues of stocks and bonds for America's Corporations.At Salomon Brothers they were lowest of the low.Analysts photocopied,proofread and assembled breathtakingly dull securities documents for 90 and more hrs. a week.If they did this particulary well,analysts were thought well of their bosses."
"This was a dubious honor.Bosses attached beepers to their favorite analysts,making it possible to call them in at all hours.A few of the very best analysts,months into their new jobs,lost their will to live normal lives.They rarely slept and often looked ill;better they became at the jobs,the nearer they appeared to death.One extremely successful analyst(a friend I envied for exalted station in life ) working for Dean Witter in '83 was so strung out that he regularly nipped into a bathroom Stall during midday lulls and slept on the toilet.He worked straight through most nights and on weekends,yet felt guilty for not doing more.By definition an analyst's job lasted only two years.Then he was expected to go to a business school (so they analysts without an MBA degree at that time).Many analysts later admit that their two years between college and business school were the worst of their lives!!
The Analyst was a prisoner of his own narrowly focused ambition.He wanted money.He wanted to be thought successful by others like him."

During his college days,there was a surge in the people going for Economics and Statistics courses as that was their best bet if they wanted to make it to an I-bank (Strangely enough Michael Lewis had majored in Art History.Whew!!)
p24,"Studying Economics was more a ritual sacrifice.I often asked otherwise intelligent members of the prebanking set why they studied economics, and they explained that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent their time drawing funny little graphs.Economics was practical.It got people jobs.And it did this because it it demonstrated that they were among the most fervent believers in the primacy of economic life."

On why he didn't take up Economics-the fad in the 80's
p25,"I had made a conscious decision not to study economics at Princeton,partly because everyone else was doing it for what sounded to me like the wrong reasons.Dont get me wrong.I knew I'd one day need to earn a living.But it seemed a waste not to seize the unique opportunity to stretch your brain on something that genuinely excited you.It also seemed a waste not to use the rest of the University.So I landed up in one of the least used departments in the Campus.Art History was the opposite of economics;nobody wanted it on his resume.Art History, as an economics major once told me,is for preppy girls from connecticut.The idea that art history might be self improving or that self improvement,as distinct from career building,was a legitimate goal of education was widely regarded as naive and reckless.Some of my classmates were visibly sympathetic towards me,as if I were a cripple or had unwittingly taken a vow of poverty."
"Nevertheless,Wall Street seemed very much like the place to be at the time.The World didn't need another lawyer,I hadn't the ability to become a doctor,and my idea for starting a business making little satchels to hang off the rear ends of dogs to prevent them from crapping on the streets of Manhattan(ad jingle :We stop the plop) never found funding.Probably the real truth of the matter was that I was frightened to miss the express bus on which everyone I knew seemed to have a reserve seat,for fear there would be no other."