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Liar's Poker - fore-telling doom?
By Joy Healey
When my son was studying for his degree in Investment, Finance and Risk (about 4 years ago) he gave me a book to read that he'd enjoyed and thought I would too. It was "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis, and it painted a picture of merchant banking and life inside the dealing rooms in New York and London during the 1980s. Now I'm no expert on any of this, my son gave me it more or less as an accessible story that might help me understand some of the terms he was learning at uni. It was an eye-opener, with references to "Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and even Ginnie Mae" - organisations that were completely foreign to ME at the time, but have recently been brought to prominence in a manner I'm sure they wouldn't have wished. So as I read the book, with the wrapping up of weird and wonderful packaged investments, I treated it more or less as a work of fiction. Nothing in real life could be like that! Or could it? Sure enough, just a few years later I, and the rest of the long-suffering public, discover that all this "weird stuff" from the book really was happening. I couldn't begin to do the book justice, so do find it yourself and have a read. While hilarious and a great read at one level (when I first read it), realising now how much truth there was in it, it's scary. The footnote to this story is that in his last year of uni my son applied to all the usual top investment banks - Lehman Brothers included - but wasn't "lucky enough" to be selected. Had he been chosen, what a celebration we would have had at the time, thinking he was "made for life". And how wrong we would have been. Instead, he decided from the brief taster he'd had for city life (in his intern year) that it was for "faster talkers" than he, and he changed his career options. |
Liar's Poker
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This intel was contributed by Joy Healey
Joy Healey
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May, 2012
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