A brilliant and funny memoir of life on Wall Street in the 1980s. Michael Lewis shows exactly how craven and self-serving his firm, Salomon Brothers, had become by the time of his arrival in 1985. Previously a backwater, Jewish-led, bond trading firm, Salomon rode the wave of leverage in the Reagan era to become the most profitable investment bank in the world. Yet part of that success came from keeping good deals on its own books and passing bad bets to its customers. Lewis describes his first qualms and eventual acceptance of "jamming" bad bond deals down the throats of European investors and the praise from his superiors whenever he had sold a horrible deal. For instance, after selling some crappy AT&T bonds to a German investor he was praised as corporate hero, though he had to endure the "primal Teutonic scream" of his irate customer on an almost daily basis thereafter. As one of the teachers at his training program told him "Some people were born customers," meaning born-suckers. (Not surprisingly, Salomon's irate customers soon stopped taking the abuse and not long after Lewis published this book it was bought up by Traveler's Group and later Citi.)

Perhaps most interesting for those reading the book today, Lewis takes a strange 100-page segue to describe the history of mortgage-backed securities, the first of which was sold by Salomon brothers trader Lewis Ranieri in 1979. He describes the MBS as an only slightly less important financial innovation than junk bonds, which, in light of current events, is an amazing understatement. Lewis, who has a fine eye for business culture, describes how Ranieri self-consciously assembled a group of fat, slovenly, back-office Italian traders (their words) to compete in the then impoverished mortgage market. He strove to create his own oppositional culture inside the increasingly WASPish firm, and, after Congress liberalized Savings and Loans investment rules in 1982, his band of misfits became some of the most profitable traders on planet earth. The rest is history.

Parts of the book move surprisingly slow (he takes almost a 100 pages describing his training program), and I wish there was more focus on his own experience as a salesman, but all of it is engaging and well-written. It's a great inside look at how Wall Street worked, and works.