Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Why we MUST NOT FORGET..why OWS is Important...Remember "Wall Street" the Movie and "Liar's Poker?"
Remember "Wall Street"
the blockbuster Movie about Greed ) and the Book detailing WS Abuses?
Michael Lewis the Author of the Book ("Liar's Poker"
that the Movie was based on (so long ago) wrote this article about writing the Book hoping that what he saw and cataloged would NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN...but, sadly he found that Wall Street used his Book and Movie to perpetuate NEW SCAMS. He felt that his book would end something that he found horrifying...but instead some Players on Wall Street used his book and the Movie as a playbook for MORE ROBBERY AND CRIMINALITY. And younger ones who saw the movie who were good at "numbers" also used it to make a CAREER out of what his movie and book were trying to EXPOSE as WRONG DOING:
Anyway...A Retrospective.
-----
The End
by Michael Lewis
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in "Liar's Poker," returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.
Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.
I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say,"How Quaint!"
I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like,I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers. I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.
Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar's Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual.
In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parent's world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?
MUCH MORE: And, It's MUCH RETROSPECTION...but, PROFOUND and GOOD READ at:
http://www.greatertalent.com/speaker-news/michael-lewis-writes-about-the-end-of-wall-street/
EDITED: For better link...the other one had weird code copy...this link is better.
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
