A classic. Never read it until 2010. Loved it! Parts of it made me sick. Other parts made me howl!

Lewis, Michael – Liar’s Poker, W.W. Norton & Company New York, NY Copyright © 2009 by Michael Lewis.

Here are a few excerpts I found poignant (Any emphasis is mine):

“The thrifts paid a fee to have their mortgages guaranteed. The shakier the loans, the larger the fee a thrift had to pay to get its mortgages stamped by one of the agencies. Once they were stamped, however, nobody cared  about the quality of the loans. Defaulting homeowners became the government’s problem. The principle underlying the programs was that these agencies could better assess and charge for credit quality than individual investors.” P. 135

“Most of the time when markets move, no one has any idea why. A  man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker. It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it’s amazing what people will believe.” P. 231

“Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes. Different investors place different prices on risk. If you are able, as it were, to buy risk from one investor cheaply and sell it to another investor dearly, you can make money without taking any risk yourself. And this is what we did.” P. 232

“If social contribution had been the measure, I should have been billed rather than paid at the end of the year.” Pp. 250-251.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry – yet you cannot deny – Michael Lewis remains on of America’s literary greats. Again, Liar’s Poker is a “classic must-read!”