Writing Sample:

Liars Poker

            When thinking about how I was going too critically and conceptually write this paper I

tried to think of how I could associate these books themes with the themes of what we have been

discussing in our lectures and from other works we have studied.  Is greed good?  Does history

repeat itself?  Are all business men/woman woven from the same cloth and are all buyers

clueless?  These are just some of the discussion questions that we have posed and debated.  I

believe that all of these topics are true in their own way.  Greed encourages growth and self-

preservation, history has proven that one defeated problem can and typically will show up again

just in another form and lastly traders and business men alike do what they are trained to do and that is sell a product to whoever will buy it.  In the narrative by Michael Lewis Liar’s Poker we are shown the United States stock and bond market through the eyes of a young and inexperienced man who witnesses all of the ins and outs of its sales.  We are shown the for-shadowing of our economies future and the concept that history repeats itself shines bright between Liar’s Poker and Lewis’ later book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.  It is human nature that causes everything that is good to happen and everything that is bad to happen and it is because of the consistent nature of human beings that history repeats itself and is condemned to always repeat itself. 

            It is human nature to want and it is an American individualistic society that says all Americans have the right to everything because you are, simply put, an American.  It does not matter how you obtain these things but it is your god and National given right to get what it is that you strive for.  This concept is at the for front of Michael Lewis’ first novel Liar’s Poker.  Fresh faced and right out of college young men and women in the late 70’s and early 80’s with very little experience wanting something that they believed they deserved: money.  These young men and woman entered Wall Street not knowing much of anything about the stock market yet turning huge profits in their first few years.  “Why do you want to be an investment banker?”

“Well, really, when you get right down to it, I want to make money.” (Pg. 32)  This was an excerpt from Liar’s Poker in the second chapter where Mr. Lewis is in an interview with the Lehman Brothers bank and he is asked why he wanted to be an investment banker.  Lewis’ response mirrors the exact ideals of these young men and women of that time.  They did not want to learn or gain experience, they wanted a lot of cash and a lot of cash right out of the gate.  To these young individuals it did not matter how they made that money and for the major company that Liar’s Poker fallows, Solomon Brothers, that meant selling Junk Bonds and making a lot of money from them.  This is an exact real life example of what was happening in the movie we watched earlier in the semester, Boiler Room.  You had investment banking companies bringing in all of these young individuals who really knew nothing about investment banking and taught them the inner workings of how it all worked and taught them the way they wanted to teach it.  In contrast to the inexperience of age in Liar’s Poker we are shown a new age of tradesman in Lewis’ latter Wall Street novel, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.  In this book we see the opposite of age with these tradesman but still the existence of entitlement and even inexperience.  The Big Short takes us into the realm of bond sales and credit default swaps.  Few individuals new that the housing bubble would burst so they started to bet against the market and in turn hurt a lot of people and banks but turned astronomical profits when the market finally crashed.  The individuals in The Big Short were the exact opposite of the young kids from Liar’s Poker.  They were experienced they were already wealthy but they saw something that others did not and just like those young kids in the 80’s did, they went for it because they wanted it.  There was no higher up that could stop them from doing it and as stated earlier, if you believe you deserve that money, you will go out and get it no matter what the cost at hand for you or others may be. 

            Greed is the shadow for history to repeat itself.  When looking at world wars and stock market crashes, they do not just happen by the grace of god or by a fluke.  They are all calculated and planned out to the point where people, like the higher up individuals in The Big Short, can even tell when it is coming.  Wars repeat themselves due to lust for power by an individual or individuals.  Greed for money is no different than lust for power or land.  Every individual that we have read about in our books and in the movies that we have watched have had one thing on their minds and that is to make money.  Greed is good, greed sparks a match for people that if you work hard and go out and take what you want, you can be successful.  Greed can also be blinding to individuals and to society as a whole.  Greed is not prejudice to age no matter how much experience you may have.  From the young guns fresh out of Ivy Leagues in Liar’s Poker, to the boys in Boiler Room, Wall Street and The Big Short greed for money and power took them all over because it is natural human want for power that drives not just people but in terms of business the Stock Market.  In a free capital stock market, like the one the United States employs, the stock market fluctuates based on people.  When Individuals feel good they buy, when individuals get scared they sell and often times much too quickly.  Greed works on both ends of the spectrum.  Just like the salesmen on the phone who is trying to sell a stock or a bond and turn a profit, the person buying is just as guilty of greed.  The stock market will never go away because it is a game of Poker.  You will win and you will lose and just like the game of Poker, it is very addicting. 

            A key point that I have tried to get across in this essay is that history repeats itself not just socially, or economically but personally for everyone.  We are all guilty in making the same mistakes continuously yet for whatever reason we continue to make them.  We are creatures of habit and sometimes our mistakes affect us on a small scale or sometimes they affect us on a big scale.  We are all guilty of texting and driving but for whatever reason we continue to do it.  Harry Reynard purchased a few cheap stocks to “get his feet wet” and then bet his whole life savings and tor his family apart.  We can try and fix the stock market and add restrictions and strengthen the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) but there is one thing you cannot fix or change and that is human nature.  Humans will be Humans no matter what you do.  Greed will always play a role in society until society ceased to exist and it is because of this that it is only a matter of time until we have another stock market crash.  There is a debt crisis plaguing college campuses all across the United States and that is a student loan crisis.  For many individuals or families college can be much too expensive to pay for out of pocket so individuals have to go to institutions to receive student loans.  Institutions are seeing less and less individuals paying back their loans due to the fact that there are not enough well-paying jobs in our economy to be able to support oneself and pay back thousands of dollars at the same time.  This effects our economy as a whole because it will never allow for many individuals to invest in anything because they cannot afford it.  The student debt crisis is taking young risk takers out of the stock market game, where they once rained king, simply because they cannot afford to take the risk of losing money that needs to go to loan payments.

            History will never stay the same it will always change but it will always have remnants of its past.  Michael Lewis’ Novels Liar’s Poker and The Big Short: The Doomsday Machine were both from two separate decades but involved similar trading schemes and characters.  Everything is driven by ego and greed for money and power and it is this human nature that motivates human beings and cripples us.  While reading this book I would research and learn new things regarding the topics and when ever I read an interview or watched one, specialists said that there is no huge change to the Stock Market.  They said that it really has not gotten better, things are progressing but are not better than they were.  Through reading these books and watching these movies I have come to the realization that the stock market can be improved, rotated and changed all it wants but it will never be perfect nor will it ever not fail again.  It is a system run with numbers but it is manipulated, both in good ways and bad, by human beings.  There will always be imperfections because humans are imperfect.  History has repeated itself not because of some magical reason but because human beings learn from their past and copy there past and continuously repeat their pasts.