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We were a paradox. We had been hired to deal in a market, to be more shrewd than the next guy, to be, in short, traders. Ask any astute trader and he'll tell you that his best work cuts against the conventional wisdom. Good traders tend to do the unexpected. We, as a group, were painfully predictab…

One of the benevolent hands doing the stuffing belonged to the Federal Reserve. That is ironic, since no one disapproved of the excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s so much as the chairman of the Fed, Paul Volcker. At a rare Saturday press conference, on October 6, 1 1979, Volcker announced that th…

making my first mistake by neglecting to seize the chance to praise investment bankers and heap ridicule on the short work hours and Lilliputian ambition of commercial bankers

[...] Investment bankers had a technique known as the stress interview. If you were invited to Lehman's New York offices, your first interview might begin with the interviewer asking you to open the window. You were on the forty-third floor overlooking Water Street. The window was sealed shut. That…

There was a good reason for this. Economics satisfied the two most basic needs of investment bankers. First investment bankers wanted practical people, willing to subordinate their educations to their careers. Economics, which was becoming an ever more abstruse science, producing mathematical treat…