I understand it’s fun if you’re treating it like a casino. And the fiction is that people can go into the market and systematically beat the market and you should be doing this with your money. I’m not sure what Robinhood upends - preserving both a fiction and the guts of a screwed up stock market without making a real dent on anything meaningful. They were disrupting Wall Street in all kinds of ways. The old characters of that era were sort of smashing the aisles. It’s more like there’s a flatness to it that technology has encouraged. My impression is that technology has made the characters somehow a little less rich. And if they’re incentivized badly, they don’t.Īs a storyteller, what do you think of today’s set of characters? If they’re incentivized properly, they tend to do things that are more or less in the interest of everybody else. But I think the system is perpetually screwed up, and I don’t quite understand why, except that people get themselves in positions of influence and they’re able to make money from a screwed up system. I can’t say I don’t like Wall Street people. Personally, do you have a positive or negative impression of Wall Street? I guess I should have anticipated that mainly what a young person was going to get from this was how much fun Wall Street was. They were kind of funnier on the page than they were in real life. Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” was supposed to be an indictment, too, but everybody wanted to be Gordon Gekko. It seemed to me that your book was an indictment of Wall Street but may have had the opposite effect. It’s such a different environment, even though maybe the underlying relationship to the rest of the society hasn’t changed. They’re just guys and women staring at screens and doing things with their computers. I’ve walked onto a big hedge fund trading floor, and they’re completely silent. The sound and the smell and the kind of taste of the place seems to have changed. I think there are characters like Jamie Dimon who would have fit very comfortably on the Salomon trading floor. Now it’s all been kind of flattened into this gray. There wasn’t anything quite like Salomon Brothers then.

The corporate culture was almost anything goes and there was a delight in that, especially for someone writing about it. The place tolerated a range of human behavior and a range of character that corporations don’t today. And this financialization business is going to stop or be slowed. Society is going to get its arms around Wall Street. They were willing to pay me probably millions of dollars, but certainly hundreds of thousands, to dish out financial advice when I certainly didn’t know what you should be doing with your money. I vividly thought that I was trying to describe Brigadoon.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis