Michael Lewis's debut book is a wickedly funny and deeply revealing memoir of his years as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, one of the most profitable and culturally influential decades in Wall Street history. Lewis arrived at Salomon straight out of the London School of Economics, having barely studied finance, and quickly found himself thrust into a world of extraordinary excess, institutional cynicism, and spectacular compensation that bore no rational relationship to the value delivered to clients. The book's title refers to a high-stakes bluffing game played with the serial numbers on dollar bills — a metaphor for the entire culture of mortgage-backed securities trading that Salomon helped invent. Lewis provides an unforgettable portrait of the bond trading floor's tribal hierarchy, from the godlike "Big Swinging Dicks" at the top to the hapless trainees at the bottom, and traces the development of the mortgage bond market and the junk bond revolution with clarity and wit. Written as a cautionary tale intended to warn bright young people away from Wall Street, the book instead became a recruiting advertisement, and Lewis has spent the subsequent decades chronicling the financial industry's recurring capacity to repeat its own disasters.