Liar’s Poker

Matty Oliva is a new member of the mortgage-trading department. He is treated like a flunky, made to fetch food for the rather overweight older traders. One day Oliva dutifully gathers multiple trays of food and drink from the cafeteria and manages to sneak through the line without paying. He boasts about it, whereupon the traders conspire to “goof” him with a faked investigation of the theft by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Oliva is terrified, but when he realizes he’s been pranked and humiliated, he decides tearfully that he should quit. A trader talks him out of it: “Some of the cruelty, however, wasn’t personal but ceremonial” (104). Oliva decides his job, one of the most lucrative on Wall Street, is well worth the suffering.

Salomon partner Robert Dall realizes in 1978 that mortgages may be central to the firm’s future, even if most traders look down their noses at the savings and loan presidents who generate those mortgages. By 1980 the home mortgage market has “surpassed the combined United States stock markets as the largest capital market in the world” (105). Single home loans aren’t worth an investor’s time, but pooled together by type and standardized—the risk averaging out to nearly nothing—groups of mortgages can be treated as investments.