The Money Culture

After Liar's Poker made him famous in 1989, Michael Lewis kept writing about money for magazines and newspapers, and this 1991 collection gathers roughly 30 of those pieces. They range across Wall Street and its offshore imitators, Japanese investors buying up the world, Donald Trump and the economics of leveraged buyouts.

Lewis wrote these as a former Salomon Brothers bond salesman who had worked in New York and London, which gives him an insider's ear for how deals are sold and a satirist's eye for the people selling them. Kirkus called him the wittiest critic of private enterprise in decades and praised the collection as a lively record of the late-1980s boom, while noting that not every piece works.

This is minor Lewis compared with Liar's Poker, The Big Short or Flash Boys: short pieces, some dated, with no single narrative. Its value is as a time capsule. Read alongside Den of Thieves and Barbarians at the Gate, it shows how the junk bond, takeover and globalization boom looked to a smart, skeptical young writer while it was happening, and it is an early sketch of the voice and themes he would develop in his later books. Completists and readers interested in 1980s finance will get the most from it.

1. Booms produce their own characters. The financiers, promoters and celebrity investors Lewis profiles show how easy money rewards salesmanship as much as judgment.
2. Leverage was the decade's real product. The buyout pieces capture how much of the era's deal-making ran on borrowed money and the fees it generated.
3. Wall Street exports its habits. The reports from London, Paris, Australia and Japan show the same speculative culture spreading as capital became global.
4. Concentrated risk can come from anywhere. The Tokyo earthquake essay is an early look at how a single shock in one financial center could ripple through interconnected markets.
5. Satire is a form of due diligence. Lewis's habit of asking what the people selling an idea actually gain from it is a useful reflex for anyone pitched a deal or a fund.

The book is a collection rather than a narrative. After an introduction, Lewis sorts its roughly 30 pieces into three parts by geography, moving from American finance to Europe and then to Japan.

1. New World. The longest part covers the American boom and its hangover: Christmas on Wall Street, the American Express card in Leave Home Without It (the piece Kirkus found overlong), leveraged buyouts in Leveraged Rip-Off and Barbarians at the Trough, how Wall Street took the savings and loans for a ride, Michael Milken's morals, Donald Trump, and Louis Rukeyser's investment cruises in Taken for a Ride on the Customer's Yacht.
2. The Old World. Pieces from Lewis's years in London and on the European scene, including Les Golden Boys, on the young French traders of the Paris bond futures market, Portrait of the American as a Bond Salesman, what the British can learn from American history, and the carving up of Europe by dealmakers.
3. Other World. Japan at the height of its bubble: How a Tokyo Earthquake Could Devastate Wall Street, the New York investment banker abroad, Kamikaze Capitalism, the Japanese art bubble and A Wall Street Yankee in the Imperial Court.

The classic warts-and-all portrait of the 1980s financial scene.

The 1980s was the most outrageous and turbulent era in the financial market since the crash of '29, not only on Wall Street but around the world. Michael Lewis, as a trainee at Salomon Brothers in New York and as an investment banker and later financial journalist, was uniquely positioned to chronicle the ambition and folly that fueled the decade.