Liar's Poker Quotes
"At any given moment on the trading floor billions of dollars were being risked by bond traders."
"Gutfreund seemed able to smell money being lost."
"The peculiar feature of Gutfreund's challenge this time was the size of the stake."
"Meriwether was the King of the Game, the Liar's Poker champion of the Salomon Brothers trading floor."
"In Liar's Poker a group of people form a circle. Each player holds a dollar bill close to his chest."
"The game is similar in spirit to the card game known as I Doubt It."
"The game has some of the feel of trading, just as jousting has some of the feel of war."
"The money came from risk takers such as Meriwether, and whether it came or not was really beyond Gutfreund's control."
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
"Man for man Salomon Brothers was, in 1985, the world's most profitable corporation."
"Bond prices move inversely, lockstep, to rates of interest."
"People who believe themselves of social consequence tend to leave more of a paper trail."
"The only person within earshot who didn't appear distinctly uncomfortable was the queen mother herself."
"The first inalienable right of a trainee was to dawdle and amuse himself before he settled into his chair for the morning."
"The New York Times crossword puzzle had been photocopied 126 times and distributed."
"I was, as was my habit at this hour, biting into a knish."
"Her reward for a job well done was, perversely, to be admitted to a future training program."
"Because we were her future bosses, she wanted to be our friend."
"He had ajawline lean and sharp enough to cut cake."
"He gave a short talk, the point of which was to stress how singular and laudable was the culture of Salomon Brothers."
"Curious minds were not what Massey was after. Massey was looking for cult followers."
"He was so intensely calm and deliberate that he made you nervous."
"Their incomes had changed, and with it their lives."
"The party had been thrown in his honor, but he seemed to want it to end."
"In general, the better they recalled the Great Depression, the more suspicious they were of the leveraging of America."
"To get the best job, you had to weather the most abuse."
"Their presence was a sign of the health of the firm, just as mine was a sign of the illness."
"You were acceptable to the trading desk as long as you were relatively white and male."
"And when I ran mortgages, I religiously took people from the back office. At first I did it for moral reasons. But it worked. They appreciated it."
"No one wanted to get anywhere near the mortgage department."
"I'm twenty-three years old, and it doesn't matter if it doesn't work out. I don't have to support anything but my own drinking."
"The reason everything was separate is that no one would help us."
"The firm must have faith in mortgages or they wouldn't have Lewie doing it."
"The firm said no to everything we did. This department got built in spite of the firm, not because of the firm."
"You could never have done that. He knew what he was doing, but he could never have proved it."
"It was an honor to work at Salomon Brothers and how the firm, not the people, created the wealth."
"I couldn't have been happier there. All you had to do was trade."
"We made money no matter what we looked like."
"The market began to right the imbalance between Ranieri & Co. and the rest of the bond trading world."
"The CMO addressed the chief objection to buying mortgage securities."
"Now, at last, investors had a degree of certainty about the length of their loans."
"The irony is that it achieved precisely what Ranieri had hoped: It made home mortgages look more like other bonds."
"CMOs also opened the way for international investors who thought American homeowners were a good bet."
"By 1986, thanks to CMOs, there were plenty of buyers."
"The market settled on a fair value for CMOs by comparing them with corporate and treasury bonds."
"The world had changed. No longer did Salomon Brothers traders buy bonds at twelve and then make the market believe they were worth twenty."
"Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling."
"I'm now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone without breaking the law is to call someone he doesn't know and try to sell that person something he doesn't want."
"Investors in Japan panic. They are selling yen and trying to get their money out of the Japanese stock market. What do you do?"
"Japanese companies have massive sums invested in Europe and America. Eventually they would withdraw those investments, turn inward, lick their wounds, repair their factories, and bolster their stock."
"Each day Alexander called and explained something new."
"They made handsome profits, just like the investors to whom Alexander spoke."
"Much of our time was spent on the telephone. By style, I mean phone technique."
"I had no other point of reference. I, too, soon found myself jackknifed in my chair, twirling pencils in the corner of my mouth, plugging my ear with my fingers, talking too fast and quietly for my customers to follow."
"A phenomenon, in fact, swept across the trading floor as more and more geeks came on board."
"A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa."
"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."
"The customers, of course, hung on his every word; as I've said, they viewed Lewie as their savior."
"If you don't inherit it, you have to borrow it."
"The process they began took on a life of its own."
"Every company has got people sitting around who do nothing for what they get paid."
"The embodiment of the take-over market is a high-strung, hyperambitious twenty-six-year-old."
"The money to be made from defending and attacking large companies makes bond trading look like a pauper's game."
"We were being raided by a man financing himself with junk bonds because we had neglected to enter the business of raiding companies and financing the raids with junk bonds."
"The firm could, at little expense, have kept a small staff in both markets."
"A star municipal bond salesman could easily become a star government bond salesman."
"Salomon's senior management had never before tried to purchase the loyalty of its people."
"I learned that people can be corrupted by organizations."