Preface
I WAS A BOND salesman, on Wall Street and in London. Working beside traders at Salomon Brothers put me, I believe, at the epicenter of one of those events that help to define an age. Traders are masters of the quick killing, and a lot of the killings in the past ten years or so have been quick. And Salomon Brothers was indisputably the king of traders. What I have tried to do here, without, as it were, leaving my seat on the Salomon trading floor, is to describe and explain the events and the attitudes that characterized the era; the story occasionally tails away from me, but it is nonetheless my story throughout. The money I did not make and the lies I did not tell I still understood in a personal way because of my position.
That was somewhere near the center of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London. There has never before been such a fantastic exception to the rule of the marketplace that one takes out no more than one puts in. Now I do not object to money. I generally would rather have more than less. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for another windfall What happened was a rare and amazing glitch in the fairly predictable history of getting and spending.
It should be said that I was, by the standards we use to measure ourselves, a success. I made a lot of money. I was told often by people who ran our firm that I would one day join them at the top. I would rather not make this boast early. But the reader needs to know that I have been given no reason to feel bitterly toward or estranged from my former employer. I set out to write this book only because I thought it would be better to tell the story than to go on living the story.