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 the money supply would cease to fluctuate with the business cycle; money supply would be fixed, and interest rates would float. The event, I think, marks the beginning of the golden age of the bond man. Had Volcker never pushed through his radical charge in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer. For in practice, the shift in the focus of monetary policy meant that interest rates would swing wildly. Bond prices move inversely, lockstep, to rates of interest. Allowing interest rates to swing wildly meant allowing bond prices to swing wildly. Before Volcker's speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn't fancy a gamble in the stock market. After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it. Overnight the bond market was transformed from a backwater into a casino. Turnover boomed at Salomon. Many more people were hired to handle the new business, on starting salaries of forty-eight grand.

Once Volcker had set interest rates free, the other hand stuffing the turkey went to work: America's borrowers. American governments, consumers, and corporations borrowed money at a faster clip during the 1980s than ever before; this meant the volume of bonds exploded (another way to look at this is that investors were lending money more freely than ever before). The combined indebtedness of the three groups in 1977 was $323 billion, much of which wasn't bonds but loans made by commercial banks. By 1985 the three groups had borrowed $7 trillion. What is more, thanks to financial entrepreneurs at places like Salomon and the shakiness of commercial banks, a much greater percentage of the debt was cast in the form of bonds than before.

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 predictable. By coming to Salomon Brothers, we were doing only what every sane money-hungry person would do. If we were unable to buck convention in our lives, would we be likely to buck convention in the market? After all, the job market is a market.

The Japanese were a protected species, and I think they knew it. Their homeland, as a result of its trade surpluses, was accumulating an enormous pile of dollars. A great deal of money could be made shepherding these dollars from Tokyo back into U.S. government bonds and other dollar investments. Salomon was trying to expand its office in Tokyo by employing experienced locals Here was the catch. Japanese tend to spend their lives with one Japanese company, and the more able ones normally wouldn't dream of working for an American firm. In joining Salomon Brothers, they traded in sushi and job security for cheeseburgers and yuppie disease, which few were willing to do. 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 traders who spoke to us never uttered so much as a peep against them. In addition, while Salomon Brothers was otherwise insensitive to foreign cultures, it was strangely aware that the Japanese were different. Not that there was a generally accepted view of how they might be different.

"I was just wondering," said Findlay, "if you could tell us what you think has been the key to your success."

This was too much. Had she asked a dry technical question, she might have pulled it off. But even the speaker started to smile. He knew he could abuse the front row as much as he wanted. His grin spoke volumes to the back row. It said, "Hey, I remember what these brown-nosers were like when I went through the training program, and I remember how much I despised speakers who let them kiss butt, so I'm going to let this woman hang out and dry for a minute, heh, heh, hen." The back row broke out in its loudest laughter yet. Someone cruelly mimed Findlay in a high-pitched voice, "Yes, do tell us why you're sooooo successful. "Someone else shouted, "Down, boy!" as if scolding an overheated poodle. A third man cupped his hands together around his mouth and hollered, "Equities in Dallas."

Poor Sally. There were many bad places your name could land on the job placement blackboard in 1985, but the absolute worst was in the slot marked "Equities in Dallas." We could not imagine anything less successful in our small world than an equity salesman in Dallas; the equity department was powerless in our firm, and Dallas was, well, a long way from New York. Thus, "Equities in Dallas" became training program shorthand for "Just bury that lowest form of human scum where it will never be seen again." Bury Sally, they shouted from the back of the room.