The Money Culture

Rating:
Summary: Mostly only historic value.
Review: Articles published in different newspapers and magazines in the years 1980-1990 about major and lesser financial adventures.
The best ones for me, were 'Eddie the Chop House Boy' - about a stock salesman who continues to take everybody for a ride at different broker houses and 'Taken for a ride on the Customer's yacht' about Louis Rukeyzer as emperor without clothes.
Most articles have only historic value: the S & L scandal, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, the RJR Nabisco battle, the cornering of the bond market by Salomon brothers, the LBO mania (leveraged Rip-Off) and the end of the Japanese bull market (kamikaze capitalism).
All articles written in an ironical or sarcastic style.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Highly recommended. Don't let the comment about it being dated mislead you -- while the essays are rooted in their time (the early 90's) their insights are likely to remain ever relevent. I especially enjoyed the essay about the changes in the Paris stock exchange.

Rating:
Summary: Michael Lewis Fan
Review: Lewis' sharp wit and effortless writing style does not come through in Money Culture. This string of dated articles seem thrown together--perhaps in an attempt to make a little money between books? However, after reading Liar's Poker I would forgive Lewis anything. It was a great inside look at bond trading. I loved it so much that I plan to read The New, New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story--even though I have minimal-to-no interest in the IT world.

Rating:
Summary: A Mediocre Anthology
Review: This collection of previously published articles is at times very funny, insightful, and a good primer on several financial issues that dominated the 1980's, but it can also be repetitive (many of the articles repeat jokes, anecdotes, and some even seem to be slightly altered version of previous articles)and is quite dated since the articles detail financial events and characters of the mid to late 1980's. I learned a fair amount about the savings and loan scandals, leveraged buy outs, and the Japanese economic miracle and collapse, and also enjoyed some amusing tales of financial excess, but I had to read through a lot of less than interesting pages to find those treasures. I would not recommend someone buy this book, but if you can find it in the library, it is certainly worth flipping through it.

Rating:
Summary: The Money Culture is US?
Review: This is a collection of essays previously published in newspapers and magazines around the nation where some 10 years ago we could witness Lewis' early literary attempts. Although Lewis is a witty, scrutinizing, insightful, and overall entertaining writer, I think this book is highly overpriced. Most of the topics in this book cover financial/business culture issues that date back during the late eighties, so there's also a bit of historical perspective to it, when LBOs were a la mode, Donald Trump was making headlines, and Japan was considered a threat to the US economy and welfare...crazy thought. Go for Liar's Poker if you want to read Michael Lewis, that script is a jewel.

Rating:
Summary: Good, entertaining reading about finance issues in the 80's
Review: This is a collection of essays previously published in newspapers and magazines around the nation where some 10 years ago we could witness Lewis' early literary attempts. The book was consistently funny, insightful, and a good primer on several financial issues that dominated the 1980's. Most of these articles, for those interested in the authors' chronological history, came after he wrote his groundbreaking financial humor book entitled Liars Poker, which is regarded as a "must read" for anyone entering into the investment banking industry, particularly in bond trading where we he worked.

Mr. Lewis' writing style is great, which is why I read his book entitled Next, another good read if you are interested. Most of the topics in this book cover financial/business culture issues that date back during the late eighties, so there's also a bit of historical perspective to it.

The topics are a wide array and include stories about the domestic S&L scandal, some events that occurred in the French Bourse (their word for a stock market), the proliferation of the American Express Card during the 1980s, some offshore banking insights, Louis Rukeyser, Donald Trump, LBO stories and some comments on the Japanese capitalists. Like I said, he talks about a wide array of topics but remember that the book is a compilation of many articles.

I give it a 4 star rating. It was highly entertaining but nothing that caused my life to change or caused me to have a "light bulb" go off in my head.

Rating:
Summary: A Mess
Review: What a disjointed mess, talk about cashing in on fame. All he did here was take a bunch of columns he wrote in the paper and called it a book. I could have done better with the letter to the editor section of the paper. I was not that enamored with Liar's Poker and this book has done it for me with this author. It was just that the articles were not that relevant any more and his writing is not that good.

Rating:
Summary: The Money Culture
Review: When the plain facts can no longer provoke a response, a deft, incisive lampooning jab is often effective. Lewis is author of the best-selling Liar's Poker (Norton, 1989), which irreverently documented the decline of Wall Street at the end of the 1980s. Here he successfully skewers the familiar cast of characters that pillaged the 1980s financial landscape. He takes on the entire money cultures of Wall Street, Europe, and Japan in this collection of send-ups and put-downs. These 30-some pieces have all appeared elsewhere, mostly in Manhattan, Inc., and the New Republic, where Lewis sometimes wrote pseudonymously to protect his job as a bond dealer with Salomon Brothers brokerage house. (He now writes for a living.) Lewis skillfully captures the previous decade in much the same way Tom Wolfe captured the 1960s and 1970s.