Hypocrisy, from a guy who got famous writing about Liars

Michael Lewis has made a return to Wall Street prominence. See here, here and here. Lewis, the author of Moneyball and Liar's Poker, among other things, has adopted a staunch tone of self-righteousness about everything from CDS to bonuses to mistrust of Wall Street. His arguments are sweeping and broad. Wall Street's a mess, and had anyone listened to his message from 20 years ago, well, none of this would have happened.

He mocks the young guns who succeeded him at Wall Street, the ones who read Liar's Poker as an instruction manual, rather than as a cautionary tale. The book was designed to inform us against Wall Street's excesses, he claims, rather than encourage those to follow the same path.

Hmmm...that's a nice thought. Lewis muses throughout Liar's Poker about how overpaid and useless he was as a young bond trader. He didn't have a clue what he was doing, but he was paid more than his parents ever had been -- though he was just out of college. A short while after he started, he coolly opted to offload $86 million dollars of near worthless bonds onto his best customer, abusing the trust he had built up to impress his superiors. (See Lowenstein's Buffett, pp 404-405). This act made him a "big swinging dick" around Salomon. He got rich off his unscrupulous act. He cashed his chips in, and he hasn't looked back since.


Were it not for Wall Street's rewarding his lack of ethics, Mr. Lewis might be an intelligent but unknown teacher of French lit at a parochial school in Jersey. Yes, Mr. Lewis would have been a wage laborer. Wall Street afforded him renown, wealth, independence, and respect (from some). But until Lewis agrees to disgorge every cent he earned from 1) his time at Salomon 2) the book he wrote about Salomon 3) everything that followed in its wake and 4) the subsequent compounding of wealth from those experiences, I would appreciate it if he simply saved us the moralizing. The lectures ring a little hollow for those who work hard, don't betray our clients and customers for our own profits, and still manage to earn a modest living at the end of the day. I enjoy his books and his writing, but I don't believe that Michael Lewis is a meta-observer of Wall Street. Rather, he is a just a man who profiteered in the same cowardly fashion as others, a few years prior. And, while he seeks to blame others for those who followed in his path, I consider it a failure of his character that he does not shoulder that responsibility himself.