【導讀】Liar'sPoker. ByMichaelLewis. I. Preface. myposition.story.70. Preface. Acknowledgments. Liar's. Poker. I. ChapterOne. LiarsPoker

　　

【正文】 in the papers, and they said that Salomon Brothers was the world39。s most profitable investment bank. True as that might be, the process of landing a job with the firm had been suspiciously pleasant. After some initial giddiness about the promise of permanent employment, I became skeptical of the desirability of life on a trading floor. It crossed my mind to hold out for a job in corporate finance. Had it not been for the circumstances, I might well have written to Leo (we were on a firstname basis) to say I didn39。t want to belong to any club that would have me so quickly for a member. The circumstances were that I had no other job. I decided to live with the stigma of having gotten my first real job through connections. It was better than the stigma of unemployment. Any other path onto the Salomon Brothers trading floor would have been cluttered with unpleasant obstacles, like job interviews. (Six thousand people had applied that year.) Most of the people with whom I would eventually work were badly savaged in their interviews and had grisly stories to tell. Except for the weird memory of Salomon39。s assault on the British throne, I had no battle scars and felt mildly ashamed. Oh, all right, Iconfess. One of the reasons I pounced on the Salomon Brothers opportunity like a loose ball was that I had already seen the dark side of a Wall Street job hunt and had no desire to see it again. As a college senior in 1981, three years before the night I got lucky in St. James39。s Palace, I applied to banks. I have never seen men oh Wall Street in such plete agreement on any issue as they were on my application. A few actually laughed at my resume. Representatives from several leading firms said I lacked mercial instincts, an expensive way, I feared, to say that I would spend the rest of my life poor. I39。ve always had difficulties making sharp transitions, and this one was the sharpest. I recall that I couldn39。t imagine myself wearing a suit. Also, I39。d never met a banker with blond hair. All moneymen I39。d ever seen were either dark or bald. I was neither. So, you see, I had problems. About a quarter of the people with whom I began work at Salomon Brothers came straight from college, so passed a test that I failed. I still wonder how. At the time, I didn39。t give trading so much as a passing thought. In this I wasn39。t unusual. If they39。d heard of trading floors, college seniors considered them cages for untrained animals, and one of the great shifts in the 1980s was the relaxing of this pose by the most expensively educated people in both America and Britain. My Princeton University Class of 1982 was among the last to hold it firmly. So we didn39。t apply to work on trading floors. Instead we angled for lowerpaying jobs in corporate finance. The starting salary was about twentyfive thousand dollars a year plus bonus. When all was said and done, the pay came to around six dollars an hour. The job title was investment banking analyst. Analysts didn39。t analyze anything. They were slaves to a team of corporate financiers, the men who did the negotiations and paper work (though not the trading and selling) of new issues of stocks and bonds for America39。s corporations. At Salomon Brothers they were the lowest of the low。 at other banks they were the lowest of the high。 in either case theirs was a miserable job. Analysts photocopied, proofread, and assembled breathtakingly dull securities documents for niy and more hours a week. If they did this particularly well, analysts were thought well of by their bosses. This was a dubious honor. Bosses attached beepers to their favorite analysts, making it possible to call them in at all hours. A few of the very best analysts, months into their new jobs, lost their will to live normal lives. They gave themselves entirely over to their employers and worked around the clock. They rarely slept and often looked ill。 the better they became at the jobs, the nearer they appeared to death. One extremely successful analyst working for Dean Witter in 1983 (a friend I envied at the time for his exalted station in life) was so strung out that he regularly nipped into a bathroom stall during midday lulls and slept on the toilet. He worked straight through most nights and on weekends, yet felt guilty for not doing more. He pretended to be constipated 梚 n case someone noticed how long he had been gone. By definition an analyst39。s job lasted only two years. Then he was expected to go to business school. Many analysts later admit that their two years between college and business school were the worst of their lives. The analyst was a prisoner of his own narrowly focused ambition. He wanted money . He didn39。t want to expose himself in any unusual way. He wanted to be thought successful by others like him. (I tell you this only because I narrowly escaped imprisonment myself, and not by choice. And had I not escaped, I surely wouldn39。t be here now. I39。d be continuing my climb up the same ladder as many of my peers.) There was one sure way, and only one sure way?, to get ahead, and everyone with eyes in 1982 saw it: Major in eomics。 use your economics degree to get an analyst job on Wall Street。 use your analyst job to get into the Harvard or Stanford Business Schiool。 and worry about the rest of your life later. So, more than any other, the question tlhat my classmates and I were asking in the fall of 1981 and the spring of 1982 was: How do I bee a Wall Street analyst? Over time this qiuestion had fantastic consequences. The first and most obvious was ai logjam at the point of entry. Any one of a number of hard statistics cam be enlisted to illustrate the point. Here39。s one. Forty percent of the tlhirteen hundred members of Yale39。s graduating class of 1986 applied tco one investment bank, First Boston, alone. There was, I think, a sense iof safety in the numbers. The larger the number o