Liar's Poker

Michael Lewis, interviewed recently (see prior blog with quotes from his 1989 book Liar's Poker:

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in
America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would
last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree
between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference
in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back
in 1986, the C.E.O. of SalomonBrothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1
million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one
of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he
lost $250 million; I assumed they'd be shocked to learn that a Wall
Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his
traders were running. What I didn't expect was that any future reader would
look on my experience and say, "How quaint."