{"id":2435,"date":"2014-11-11T15:28:19","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T23:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=2435"},"modified":"2014-11-11T15:28:19","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T23:28:19","slug":"michael-lewis-and-the-wolves-of-wall-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2014\/11\/michael-lewis-and-the-wolves-of-wall-street.html","title":{"rendered":"Michael Lewis and the Wolves of Wall Street"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar id=&#8221;E5qNaI36069IPjIw5lgPIe3Zh8gOxJpu&#8221;]<\/p>\n<p>FEW writers have penetrated the macho, risk-taking culture of finance like journalist Michael Lewis, who worked on Wall Street and in the City of London in the late &#8217;80s. His first book, the colorful, high-octane Liar&#8217;s Poker, has just been reissued for its 25th anniversary, and it describes the birth of the sort of casino capitalism\/ winner-take-all world we live with now.<\/p>\n<p>I had the pleasure of speaking to Lewis a few days ago. Our conversation, for Salon, is <a title=\"ST with Michael Lewis\" href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2014\/11\/09\/michael_lewis_on_wall_street_i_have_much_more_time_for_the_vulgarity_than_i_do_for_the_hypocrisy\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. Here&#8217;s one of my first questions.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>I imagine especially to a young man in the \u201980s, it would have seemed like an anomaly. Wall Street was booming, the City of London, which had been sleepy for a long time, was booming as well. It seems like, looking back, it wasn\u2019t as much of an anomaly as it was the beginning of the world we\u2019re in now. The scenes you\u2019ve sketched almost feel like a p<a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Liars_Poker_by_Michael_Lewis_W._W._Norton_Oct_1989.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2436\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Liars_Poker_by_Michael_Lewis_W._W._Norton_Oct_1989-196x300.jpg\" alt=\"Liar's_Poker_by_Michael_Lewis,_W._W._Norton,_Oct_1989\" width=\"196\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Liars_Poker_by_Michael_Lewis_W._W._Norton_Oct_1989-196x300.jpg 196w, https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Liars_Poker_by_Michael_Lewis_W._W._Norton_Oct_1989.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 196px) 100vw, 196px\" \/><\/a>hotographic negative of the financial crash of 2008. I wonder the extent to which you felt like you were witnessing the birth of something.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s exactly how I feel. I misread it at the time. In fact, if I had read it right I might have had less energy about the book. I thought what I was doing was capturing this very bizarre moment that could not be sustained. I really thought it was freakish; this isn\u2019t humility, this is true: I thought, \u201cthese people are paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars to give financial advice, that\u2019s fucking insane,\u201d and nobody else around me was any more qualified than me. I just felt like people were going to look back and say, \u201cCan you believe they did this?\u201d but it turned out to be the start of a new world where this became normal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Liar&#8217;s Poker stands up real well, and if anything it&#8217;s even more important\u00a0than it was in 1989. It&#8217;s Wall Street&#8217;s world now &#8212; we just live in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar id=&#8221;E5qNaI36069IPjIw5lgPIe3Zh8gOxJpu&#8221;] FEW writers have penetrated the macho, risk-taking culture of finance like journalist Michael Lewis, who worked on Wall Street and in the City of London in the late &#8217;80s. His first book, the colorful, high-octane Liar&#8217;s Poker, has just been reissued for its 25th anniversary, and it describes the birth of the sort [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,654,627],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books","7":"category-capitalism","8":"category-winner-take-all","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2437,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions\/2437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}