Logo

From Credit-Default Swaps to Deviled Eggs: Liar?s Poker Writ

Published: Nov 18, 2008

 Finance       
If it hasn’t already, Michael Lewis’ “The End”—a 9,000-word piece chronicling the fall of Wall Street published last week in Conde Nast Portfolio—will be as widely read as his 1989 cautionary tale turned guidebook to greed, Liar’s Poker.

In “The End,” the most enlightening (and entertaining) article on the credit crisis turned financial crisis yet, Lewis traces the mess back to its beginning, which coincides with the beginning of Lewis’ own career as a bond trader on Wall Street in the early 1980s, when a bank called Salomon Brothers was taken public by a man named John Gutfreund, considered by many to be the King of Wall Street and considered by Lewis to be the reason for its demise.

***