So You Wonder Why Your Retirement Is Gone

From Gary North

In December, Portfolio.com published a fascinating essay by Michael Lewis, "The End." Two decades ago, Lewis became an overnight sensation with his book, "Liar's Poker." It was a study of the hottest of hot shot investment bankers. The term, "liar's poker," got into common usage.

His article features one of the cleverest pieces of art work I have ever seen. It is a morphed image of the famous bronze bull on Wall Street, located just outside the New York Stock Exchange. The bull is on its side, dead.

Lewis begins with a description of his three years at Salomon Brothers, beginning in 1985.

"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, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous -- which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money, would be expelled from finance."