Michael Lewis Liar’s Poker (Book Review)

Michael Lewis Liar’s Poker (2006 [1989]) London: Hodder “Fuckspeak” in Finance: A Sociological and Gender Retrospective (Book Review)

‘”The fuckin’ frogs are getting their faces ripped off,” said the Pirhana, meaning the French [government] were losing a lot of money’ on a bond issue (p82). The “Pirhana” was one of the senior traders who came to talk to Michael Lewis and the other trainee traders when he joined Salomon Brothers in 1985. There is a fair amount of swearing in Liar’s Poker, Lewis’s account of the three years he spent working as a trader for the investment bank before he decided to leave at the beginning of 1988. The book is entertaining and informative, but the issue of swearing opens up questions in relation to sociological topics such as gender and diversity.

From a sociological perspective, the prevalence of swearing and sexual metaphors calls for reflection on its symbolism, both for the traders themselves and for Lewis. Leaving in the swearing makes the book feel real, reassuring the reader that nothing has been edited out for political correctness, or that Lewis has been privy to the traders at their most unguarded moments when they say what they really think. Almost all of us swear occasionally, but few of us swear freely. Swearing is gendered and represents an exercise of power, or else it connotes being taken into the swearer’s confidence. If a professor said ‘Fuck the bankers!’ in a lecture on finance and society then the university might expect to hear from some student’s fee-paying father if she told him about it; even if the father worked in finance himself and swore routinely in front of colleagues. By the 1980s excessive swearing in the workplace, as opposed to an occasional slip, probably symbolized the indifference if not contempt of bankers for the norms of white-collar work and the emerging concerns that overt verbal sexism could constitute harassment or discrimination (Maltby & Rutterford, 2012: 521).

The ethnographer Caitlin Zaloom has noted how male traders associate with each other ‘in an idiom of homosexual humor that plays on the paradigms of masculine domination,’ where ‘Fucking and being fucked are the conventional expressions of financial dominance’ (Zaloom, 2006: 122-123; quoted by Jacobs, 2012: 386). But when Lewis interviewed one trader the violent misogynistic imagery exceeded mere fucking, as the man explained how the thrifts – the Savings and Loans banks that made home loans to Americans – ‘that did the big trades’ with traders such as himself at investment banks in 1981, ‘got raped’ (p.124 my emphasis).

Instead of stepping back to reflect on the significance of the sexual metaphor, as a sociologist might do, Lewis runs with it. First, he questions whether it could really be called rape when the transactions were entered into ‘between consenting adults,’ but then admits that ‘the abuse could have been even worse’ (p.124). By the next page, Lewis is normalizing the metaphor, as he writes that, ‘Even knowledgeable thrift presidents felt they faced a choice between rape and slow suicide’ (p.125). In my view, Lewis becomes complicit in the sexist language of the traders he worked with, but he does so in such a way as to simultaneously pretend he is exposing them.

Lewis establishes his supposedly politically correct credentials early on when he notes that there was only ‘the occasional female in a blue blazer, two blacks, and a cluster of Japanese’ among the 127 predominantly ‘white male trainees’ who joined Salomon with him (pp.42-3). But as far as I can make out he makes no explicit connection between the dominance of upper middle class white men and the language of ‘fucking’ and ‘rape’. Lewis tells us that the ‘firm tolerated sexual harassment but not sexual deviance’, but he does so in the context telling the story of a trainee who ‘disappeared mysteriously amidst rumours that he had invited a senior female Salomon executive into a ménage à trois’ (p.57). By relating the toleration of sexual harassment as a jokey aside to his anecdote about the disappearance of another trainee Lewis minimizes the seriousness of it. It reads to me as if he is saying to his former colleagues, ‘Hey, I have to blow the lid on your sexism ‘cos otherwise my account might not be believable, but don’t worry I think it’s as funny as you guys.’

Lewis refers to the ‘Fuckspeak movement on the Salomon trading floor’ in which, ‘No part of speech was spared’ – ‘Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking’ (p.83). Simply listing the excess does distance Lewis from it. He discusses how to survive in such an environment, where a trader could throw a phone at a trainee’s head every time he walked past. The litany of bullying concludes with a rhetorical question: ‘How did a woman cope with a married managing director who tried to seduce her whenever he found her alone?’ (p.85) Lewis doesn’t answer his own question, and nor does he spell out exactly what he means by ‘tried to seduce’. Is this trader-speak for sexual assault? or Lewis’s own coyness about detailing just how repulsive his fellow upper middle class white men could be?

To say that Michael Lewis is one of the most successful financial journalists hardly does justice to the significance of his work. If Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is ‘the quintessential novel of 1980s American finance’ (Shaw, 2015: 26), then Lewis’s Liar’s Poker represents a genre of finance literature in its own right. The book established his credibility as an author who could access leading players in the field of finance and get them to speak candidly, then construct a coherent narrative of complicated events. Along the way, Lewis offers an exposition of complex financial practices that most general readers would otherwise probably never even attempt to understand. Lewis has written over a dozen books since Liar’s Poker, which has probably been read anew or reread as a prequel to The Big Short (Lewis, 2015), since that book has been made into an acclaimed movie.

The issue of gender and language encapsulates the ambivalence that comes through from Liar’s Poker. On one hand he styles himself as a critic of London and Wall Street, exposing the excesses and the ill-gotten gains of the financial sector. But on the other hand he celebrates the characters and their lifestyles. When Lewis tells us that, ‘this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive’ (p.81), it reads like an invitation to experience that rawness for ourselves as much as a condemnation, and the rawness of the trading room includes what Lewis calls the ‘fuckspeak’. Lewis tells us that a trader who could make millions of dollars out of the phones on the trading floor at Salomon Brothers ‘became that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick’ (p.57). And so although Lewis relates this in a semi-ironic tone he is probably more responsible than anyone else for this phrase entering the popular lexicon of how to emulate a trader.

The real story of Liar’s Poker is the rise of the mortgage bonds pioneered by traders at Salomon Brothers in the 1970s, which became highly profitable in the 1980s. The book reads retrospectively as if Lewis had great foresight given the centrality of mortgage bonds in the crisis of 2008. But the story is told through the plot of Lewis’s time at Salomon Brothers. Gender, manifested in the fuckspeak movement, is very much part of the plot, but it is not integral to the real story. Looking back to the 1980s I wonder if there could be a more gendered interpretation of the story that Lewis tells us? I don’t mean to say that being mostly upper middle class white men the traders took more risk than a diverse group that included more women would have done. Lewis himself demolishes the myth that bond traders ‘make their money by taking large risks’ (p.37). But the perception of the trading floor as ‘the rough-and-tumble centre of money-making and risk-taking’ (p.20) must have been reinforced by fuckspeak. Subsequently ‘testosterone-fuelled trading, macho attitudes to risk and a male greed for big bonuses,’ came to be blamed for contributing to the global financial crisis (Jenkins & Agnes, 2015). But they were clearly seen as vital for the success of the Big Swinging Dicks, as symbolized by their fuckspeak.

References

Jacobs, M. D. 2012. Financial Crises as Symbols and Rituals. In K. Knorr Cetina, & A. Preda (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance: 376-392. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, P., & Agnes, H. 2015. London: Sexism and the City, Financial Times. London.

Lewis, M. 2015. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine: Penguin.

Maltby, J., & Rutterford, J. 2012. Gender and finance. In K. Knorr Cetina, & A. Preda (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance: 510-528. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shaw, K. 2015. Crunch Lit: Bloomsbury.

Zaloom, C. 2006. Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London: University of Chicago Press.