Dash Riprock Flintstones
Dash Riprock Character
Dash Riprock And The Dragons

Michael Lewis said that he wrote Liar’s Poker so that fewer idealistic college kids would dream of working on Wall Street. That is not to be believed. He makes Wall Street seem far too glamourous.

He could have filled the book with the miseries of working at your desk for 16 hours a week. Instead he made it about working in London, about making fun of trainees in hilarious ways, and about making piles and piles of cash. You get amazing stories here. Who can forget the amazing put-down: “Equities in Dallas!”

There are so many vivid characters. You feel that they’re clever, and mean, but not necessarily evil. Most of them seem superbly intelligent.

Lewis is a dazzling writer. Here are my favorite lines.

Michael Lewis said that he wrote Liar’s Poker so that fewer idealistic college kids would dream of working on Wall Street. That is not to be believed. He makes Wall Street seem far too glamourous. He could have filled the book with the miseries of working at your desk for 16 hours a week. Dash Riprock is a pseudonym for a London salesman, who helps Mike and is admired by him. Dash makes cryptic comments about his nine months sales experience. Many of his comments refer to deteriorating financial conditions and management of Salomon. Dash Riprock is a pseudonym for a London salesman, who helps Mike and is admired by him. Dash makes cryptic comments about his nine months sales experience. Many of his comments refer to deteriorating financial conditions and management of Salomon.

To succeed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning “ready to bite the ass off a bear.”

Salomon Brothers never made job offers. It was too smart to give people the chance to turn it down. Salomon Brothers only gave hints.

The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.

Art history was the opposite of economics; no one wanted it on his resume. Art history, as an economics major once told me, “is for preppy girls from Connecticut.” The chief purpose of art history was clandestinely to lift the grade-point averages of the economics students.

The idea that art history might be self-improving or that self-improvement, as distinct from career building, was a legitimate goal of education was widely regarded as naive and reckless. And as we approached the end of our four years in college, this is how it seemed. Some of my classmates were visibly sympathetic toward me, as if I were a cripple or had unwittingly taken a vow of poverty.

A successful undergraduate investment banking interview sounded like a monastic chant. An unsuccessful interview sounded like a bad accident.

Lehman Brothers eventually went belly-up. A battle between the traders and the corporate financiers caused the firm to collapse in early 1984. The traders won, but what was left of the august house of Lehman wasn’t worth living in.

The thought that he might land somewhere awful in the matrix – or nowhere at all – drove the trainee to despair. He lost all perspective on the relative merits of the jobs. He did not count himself lucky just to be at Salomon Brothers; anyone who thought that way would never have got in in the first place. The Salomon trainee saw only the extremes of failure and success. Selling municipal bonds in Atlanta was unthinkably wretched. Trading mortgages in New York was mouthwateringly good.

Those who treasured their pride – or perhaps thought it best to remain aloof – feigned cool indifference by sitting in the back row and hurling paper wads at managing directors.

The Japanese undermined any analysis of our classroom culture. All six of them sat in the front row and slept. Their heads rocked back and forth and on occasion fell over to one side, so that their cheeks ran parallel to the floor. The most charitable explanation for their apathy was that they could not understand English. They kept to themselves, however, and you could never be sure of either their language skills or their motives. Their leader was a man named Yoshi. Each morning and afternoon the back-row boys made bets on how many minutes it would take Yoshi to fall asleep. They liked to think that Yoshi was a calculating troublemaker. Yoshi was their hero.

The rare Japanese whom Salomon had been able to snatch away were worth many times their weight in gold and treated like the family china.

The back row rewarded the speakers of whom the approved by standing and doing the Wave across the back of the class.

Once he started wandering aimlessly, a trainee risked disturbing the gods at play.

Wappow! Max Johnson, former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, nailed Leonard Bublick, four-eyed M.B.A. from the University of Indiana, on the side of the head with a paper wad.

It didn’t require a triple jump of the imagination to picture Massey decapitating insolent trainees with a razor-edged bowler hat. He had what some people might consider an image problem. He never smiled.

While most of America imagined that Wall Street meant the stock market, our bond market was setting the tone and the pace on Wall Street in the 1980’s. Inside Salomon Brothers the men from equities were second-class citizens. Equities, comparatively speaking, made no money.

When they came through the training program, far from presenting their posteriors for our immediate attention, as did many of the bond men, the equity department speakers delivered one long uninterrupted sales pitch.

An M.B.A. from Chicago named Franky Simon moved in for the kill. “When you trade equity options,” asked my friend Franky, “do you hedge your gamma and theta or just your delta?” The equity options specialist nodded for about ten seconds. I’m not sure he even understood the words. “That,” said Franky, “is why you are in equities.”

Bond trading had captured the imaginations of more than half the men in the class. Instead of saying “buy” and “sell” like normal human beings, they said “bid” and “offer.”

The Piranha was troubled by the Giscard, so dubbed because it was the brainchild of the government of Valery Giscard D’Estaing. The stupidity of the frogs disgusted the Piranha. He associated it with their habit of quitting work at 5:00 P.M.

As he spoke, the people in the front row grew nervous, and the people in the back row began to giggle, and the people in the front row grew more nervous still, fearing that the people in the back row would cause the Piranha to feed on us all.

Lewie would say he thought that the market was going up, and buy a hundred million dollar’s worth of bonds. The market would start to go down. So Lewie would buy two billion more bonds, and of course, the market would then go up. After he had driven the market up, Lewie would turn and say:: “See, I told you it was going to go up.”

“I thought you spoke French,” he said. “No, that was just on my resume,” I said.

When Gutfreund visited the Tokyo office, the Japanese employees bowed their heads at their desks and worked the phones furiously, as if playing charades and assigned to communicate “Men at Work.”

There was at Salomon an oft-repeated story about an American managing director in Japan who tossed his sushi on top of a small bonfire he ignited at the table.

Plenty of people at Salomon Brothers made a hobby of brutally frank character analysis.

It was widely believed that a small, bald man in a grubby room in Moscow started all rumors to wreak havoc on our Western market-based economy.

Like a crap-shooter who has a pretty lady to blow on his dice, the speculators had an amazing array of irrational systems to help them win money. The systems usually involved staring for hours at charts showing the history of bond prices. As in Rorschach ink blots, an unlikely formation, such as a human head and shoulders, made itself privately known to the viewer.

Many of our French and English speculators honestly believed the charts contained the secrets of the market. They

2021.02