Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street.

• Author: Nocera, Joseph

Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street. Michael Lewis. Norton, $18.95. The apprenticeship of Michael M. Lewis began early one morning in 1985 when he stepped out onto the gigantic trading floor of one of Wall Street's most gigantic trading firms, the esteemed, prestigious house of Salomon Brothers. Widely considered the finest bond-trading house in the world, Salomon was awash in profits and prestige in 1985, and expanding madly, as was all Wall Street in those days. Lewis, like so many bright young men of the 1980s, was the lucky recipient of the firm's expansionist dreams: barely 25 years old, he had been hired straight out of the London School of Economics, practically sight unseen. After a brief training period, he, like the rest of his "class," was let loose on the trading floor, to begin learning the mysterious craft he had chosen as his profession: the trading of bonds.

Lewis sidles up to a veteran bond trader and tries to act inconspicuous. Quickly, however, he is spotted. A short colloquy ensues, which Lewis recounts:

Trader: What fucking rock did you crawl out from under?...

Me (reddening): I just wanted to ask you a few questions.

Trader: What the fuck do you think this is, a charity? I'm busy.

Me: Can I help in any way?

Trader: Get me a burger. With ketchup.

It is deeply, weirdly appropriate that Lewis's delicious memoir of his short, three-year stint at Salomon Brothers is published now, just as the sun is setting on the eighties. The eighties were, as much as any single thing, the age of investment banking. Investment bankers set the tone for the kind of pointless paper shuffling that became the decade's excuse for business activity; they had the kind of cachet that caused business school graduates to kill for entry-level positions; they became the stars of the business magazines, photographed in soft focus, and generally portrayed as icons of the culture, not to mention New York society. They even justified their own unconscionable fees (and bonuses) as a kind of ultimate vindication of their work: If the market paid them so well, then by God, they must be doing something socially useful. (Though God forbid you should ever ask them exactly what that might be.)

And now (heh, heh, heh) just as the decade is about to end, it's all falling apart. Junk-bond LBOs are defaulting, deals are going sour, Wall Street is finding profits rather more difficult to...