Liar’s Poker

Lewis learns that his starting salary will be double that of a professor at his graduate school. He is told repeatedly that Salomon is, on a per-employee basis, the world’s most profitable company. It dominates bond trading, which has ballooned from an neglected investment practice into a huge marketplace since a 1979 Federal Reserve ruling that allows interest rates, and thus bond prices, to fluctuate. This prompts investors to vastly increase their bond portfolios. Meanwhile, borrowing by governments, firms, and consumers swells from $323 billion in 1977 to $7 trillion by 1985, and “a much greater percentage of the debt was cast in the form of bonds than before” (44). Speculators, encouraged by traders, buy and sell rapidly: “Overnight the bond market was transformed from a backwater into a casino” (43). Salomon normally takes one-eighth of 1% of each sale as its fee; given an average salesperson’s daily transactions of $300 million, such fees quickly add up.

Because Salomon traders know the bond market better than most investors, they can maneuver buyers and sellers into making more trades. This knowledge also gives them insight into a bond’s real worth: “And a fool, they would say, was a person who was willing to sell a bond for less or buy a bond for more than it was worth” (42).