Michael Lewis, who famously chronicled Wall Street's 1980s excesses in his book Liar's Poker, has a long piece in Portfolio magazine about the financial crisis.
Lewis believes that the crash has been a long time coming. "I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later… the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous…. 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."
Read his article here. Alternatively just skip to page nine, when Lewis takes John Gutfreund, his former boss, to lunch. Although initially polite, Gutfreund eventually lives up to his depiction in the book.
I looked up. The boxer was smiling—though it was less a smile than a placeholder expression. And he was saying, very deliberately, “Your…fucking…book.”
I smiled back, though it wasn’t quite a smile.
“Your fucking book destroyed my career, and it made yours,” he said…
