End of Wall Street

Where did Wall Street go wrong? Everywhere. In the Dec08 Portfolio.com “The End of Wall Street’s Boom,” by Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker):

“To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall.… I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later.”