Liar's Poker: The Sequel Cometh?

Michael Lewis, of Liar's Poker and Moneyball fame--both great, great books--has written an astounding article, "The End of Wall Street's Boom." It's an absolute must-read, unlike the portion of the kibble bag label that tells you how much to feed according to an inconsequentiality like body weight. He starts out with a fairly innocent, self-deprecating statement:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me.

Follows up with understatement:

Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.

And sets up and asks a burning question:

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

And describes some profound (profane?) roadblocks:

There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product.

The quotes don't begin to describe the essay, which, like Liar's Poker, is a fascinating inside look at the characters (unflawed as well as very much otherwise) and shenanigans behind the financial headlines. Just read it. And not the kibble bag label. Please.