Liar's Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s.

[1] First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and the fictional The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.

Two important figures in that history feature prominently in the text, the head of Salomon Brothers' mortgage department Lewis Ranieri and the firm's CEO John Gutfreund.

Examples included: yelling at and insulting financial experts who talked to them; throwing spit balls at one another and at lecturers; calling phone sex lines and then broadcasting them over the company's intercom; gambling on behavioral traits (such as how long it took certain trainees to fall asleep during lectures); and the trainees' incredible lust for money and contempt for any position that did not earn much.

Lewis attributed the bond traders' and salesmen's behavior to the fact that the trading floor required neither finesse nor advanced financial knowledge, but rather, the ability and desire to exploit others' weaknesses, to intimidate others into listening to traders and salesmen, and the ability to spend hours a day screaming orders under high-pressure situations.

Lewis also attributed the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s and 1990s to the inability of inexperienced and provincial small-town bank managers to compete with Wall Street.

He described people on Wall Street as masters at taking advantage of an undiscerning public, which the savings and loan industry provided in abundance.