One of the most prominent was Steve Eisman. He asked Whitney to give him a list of investors who had predicted the crash ahead of time. Lewis realized that a number of people within the Wall Street system had realized ahead of time that it was headed toward a crash because of these bad subprime mortgage bonds. Lewis then heard of a hedge fund manager named John Paulson who had made billions of dollars by betting against the subprime mortgage bonds that had gotten Citigroup in trouble. Eisman had expressed great pride in her after she had called out Citigroup. thanks to a kind mentor named Steve Eisman who helped her to rise through the ranks. It turned out that she had a background in literature, and ended up working at Oppenheimer and Co. In March 2008, he reached out to her in order to find out more about how she had been able to make these predictions. Lewis felt personally invested in Whitney’s takedown of Wall Street because he knew that he could have raised similar alarm bells he had worked with many of the same people that she warned against. People began to listen to her warnings about how risky and unbalanced Wall Street had been. In 2007, however, an analyst named Meredith Whitney correctly predicted that Citigroup had badly mismanaged its affairs, and caused a crash in the stock market. Lewis came to believe that nothing could bring down Wall Street. Instead, his readers seemed to approach the book as a “how-to manual.” New generations joining Wall Street continued its tradition of huge bonuses, rogue traders, and scandals. Lewis expected that readers of his book would be appalled by his stories and see them as a reflection of a particularly crazy and unstable time in the 1980s. This was also the first time someone had written about the bond market, as opposed to the stock market. When he wrote this, he believed he was penning a kind of warning for future employees or investors he didn’t think anyone would believe that such crazy and risky things could happen on Wall Street, if someone who had first-hand knowledge did not record them. His first book, Liar’s Poker, tells the story of his experience on Wall Street. He worked there for three years before leaving, partly out of a sense that his situation must be unsustainable because he was so unqualified. When he was only 24, he landed a job with Salomon Brothers, though he felt very unprepared for the position. Michael Lewis’ telling of this story draws on his personal experience on Wall Street.
0 kommentar(er)
