So, in the midst of my developing job search I am sitting at home on a lonely D.C. Saturday night reading Michael Lewis's Wall Street classic Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street--and it is remarkably entertaining!
If you haven't read the book, it is, essentially, a witty tale of Lewis's own ascension into the ranks of Salomon Brothers bond traders in the early 1980s (with digressions that detail the rise of the bond market--particularly the mortgage market--itself), and it is just the kind of "Wall Street is a jungle" memoir I expected. The characters are over-the-top corporate warlords and mercenaries. The dialogue is brash, misogynistic, and uncomplicated, and the intensity is unreal. I love it!
While my own moral pretensions give me pause as I read of the seemingly value-less existence of these Wall Street demi-gods, the competitive juices inspired by the book are hard to resist. There is something refreshing, I think, about pure, unadulterated competition--something that fuels the heart and inspires the soul; and while the Liar's Poker's pursuit of money motif is admittedly superficial, the underlying ferocity of the human spirit is impressive as detailed by Lewis. It is easy to forget, coming straight from Michael Barone's "Soft America" the violence of those competitive forces upon which this entrepreneurial country was founded, and it is nice to be reminded once and again.
My favorite quote so far:
The investment banker was a breed apart, a member of a master race of deal makers. He possessed vast, almost unimaginable talent and ambition. If he had a dog, it snarled. He had two little red sports cars yet wanted four. To get them, he was, for a man in a suit, surprisingly willing to cause trouble.
Creative destruction at its finest.
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