“I would have just said, ‘Well, the financial industry is doing something else screwy.’” “Without them, I would not have written about it – I probably wouldn’t even have written a magazine article about it,” he said. But characters like IEX founder Brad Katsuyama, he said, fascinated him enough to dig back in. In it, Lewis follows a handful of men inside the system who seek to change the system and start their own exchange, IEX, that aims to put investors back on an even playing field.Īfter writing books like “Panic,” on the 2008 financial crisis, and “The Big Short,” about the housing crisis, he was less than excited to sink himself deeper into the intricacies of American finance. In Lewis’s signature crisp prose, it exposed the practices of high-frequency trading on Wall Street that have rigged the system for a select few. Lewis’s most recent book, “Flash Boys,” became a major news event in itself when it was published less than a year ago. … Time has mellowed whatever hostilities there were when the book came out.” “When it came out all of my friends thought it was funny. “’Liar’s Poker’ didn’t cost me any friendships,” he said.
“Given that the last few books of mine have been Wall Street-related – the next few won’t be, I’m moving on – but nevertheless, the last few have been, so he seemed like a really good person to sit down and talk to,” Lewis explained.Īfter “Liar’s Poker” was published in 1989, Lewis said, he and his former colleagues, like Bernard, bonded over the lively warts-and-all portrait of the ‘80s boys club on Wall Street. So, when Lewis was invited by Aspen Words – the nonprofit formerly known as the Aspen Writers’ Foundation – to speak at its Winter Words series, he requested Bernard as his interlocutor. But from the minute I met him, I adored him.” “You got the sense that if you said something stupid, he would let you know it. “He was somebody everybody was afraid of,” Lewis recalled with a laugh in a phone interview last week.
Lewis will join the Human Piranha – Aspen’s Tom Bernard – on stage Thursday at Winter Words. Among those characters was the indomitable “Human Piranha,” who proffered his expertise to Lewis’s training class in “a steady stream of bottom-line analysis and profanity.”
In Michael Lewis’s breakthrough book, “Liar’s Poker,” he vividly chronicled his time as a Wall Street bond salesman and memorably captured the larger-than-life characters of the go-go 1980s at Salomon Brothers. More info: Lewis’s talk will be broadcast live on Aspen Public Radio. “Wait-list” tickets available at the door on a first-come, first-served basis beginning at 5:30 p.m.
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