Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
An absolutely hilarious, very, very dark, vivid account of how Michael Lewis came out of Princeton and, with basically no qualifications, got a job in the bond trading department of Salmon Brothers in the early 80s. The big thing about Liar’s Poker is that it’s still one of the very few books that actually describes the psychology of that world from the inside. Lewis actually was one of these guys, and it’s genuinely important to hear what they’re thinking and how they’re reacting.
Shall we talk about Liar’s Poker?
The great thing about it is, it’s still a wonderfully entertaining book: an absolutely hilarious, very, very dark, vivid account of how Michael Lewis came out of Princeton and, with basically no qualifications, got a job in the bond trading department of Salmon Brothers. This was in the early 80s, just at the point at which the bond market really started to take off in terms of its size. They had a complete free rein to invent all these new financial products and the Financial Products Division, where Lewis worked, wrote all the CDS, the credit default swaps insurance that ended up taking the system over the edge of a cliff. There really is a direct line in the narrative between them and the great crash, so there’s a real historic interest in the book, as well as anything else. But the big thing about Liar’s Poker is that it’s still one of the very few books that actually describes the psychology of that world from the inside. Lewis actually was one of these guys, and I wouldn’t shy away from using the words genuinely important – it’s genuinely important to hear what they’re thinking and how they’re reacting. Lewis says that it was meant to be a book that completely put people off working in the world of money and made them want to be marine biologists, whereas in fact, as he says now, people just read it as a how-to book.
Didn’t he realise that it might have that effect?
Well, I think a lot of people who disapprove, or feel they’ve seen through the world of money are very slightly in love with it. There’s something exhilarating about baddies always, and about people who insist on the world as it is rather than on the world as it might be or should be. And the people in these worlds are really like that. There’s something very thrilling about the amorality of it. But, for all that, I think Lewis was also disgusted and had had enough. No doubt he’d always wanted to tell stories, which I think he does superbly well and it got him away from it all.
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John Lanchester is the author of Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, an account of the 2008 global financial meltdown. He has written a memoir and three novels, the first of which won the 1996 Whitbread First Novel award, and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The Guardian.
