liar＇spoker-说谎者的扑克牌(doc123)-经营管理(编辑修改稿)

liar＇spoker-说谎者的扑克牌(doc123)-经营管理(编辑修改稿)内容摘要：

me of the feel of war. The questions a Liar39。 s Poker player asks himself are, up to a point, the same questions a bond trader asks himself. Is this a smart risk? Do I feel lucky? How cunning is my opponent? Does he have any idea what he39。 s doing, and if not, how do I exploit his ignorance? If he bids high, is he bluffing, or does he actually hold a strong hand? Is he trying to induce me to make a foolish bid, or does he actually have four of a kind himself? Each player seeks weakness, predictability, and pattern in the others and seeks to avoid it in himself. The bond traders of Goldman, Sachs, First Boston, Man Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and other Wall Street firms all play some version of Liar39。 s Poker. But the place where the stakes run highest, thanks to John Meriwether, is the New York bond trading floor of Salomon Brothers. The code of the Liar39。 s Poker player was something like the code of the gunslinger. It required a trader to accept all challenges. Because of the code 梬 hich was his code桱 ohn Meriwether felt obliged to play. But he knew it was stupid. For him, there was no upside. If he won, he upset Gutfreund. No good came of this. But if he lost, he was out of pocket a million bucks. This was worse than upsetting the boss. Although Meriwether was by far the better player of the game, in a single hand anything could happen. Luck could very well determine the oute. Meriwether spent his entire day avoiding dumb bets, and he wasn39。 t about to accept this one. No, John, he said, if we39。 re going to play for those kind of numbers, I39。 d rather play for real money. Ten million dollars. No tears. Ten million dollars. It was a moment for all players to savor. Meriwether was playing Liar39。 s Poker before the game even started. He was bluffing. Gutfreund considered the counterproposal. It would have been just like him to accept. Merely to entertain the thought was a luxury that must have pleased him well. (It was good to be rich.) On the other hand, ten million dollars was, and is, a lot of money. If Gutfreund lost, he39。 d have only thirty million or so left. His wife, Susan, was busy spending the better part of fifteen million dollars redecorating their Manhattan apartment (Meriwether knew this). And as Gutfreund was the boss, he clearly wasn39。 t bound by the Meriwether code. Who knows? Maybe he didn39。 t even know the Meriwether code. Maybe the whole point of his challenge was to judge Meriwether39。 s response. (Even Gutfreund had to marvel at the king in action.) So Gutfreund declined. In fact, he smiled his own brand of forced smile and said, You39。 re crazy. No, thought Meriwether, just very, very good. Chapter Two Never Mention Money I want to be an investment banker If you had 10,000 sheres [sic] I sell them for you. I make a lot of money. I will like my job very, very much 1 will help people I will be a millionaire I will have a big house It will be fun forme 桽 evenyearold Minnesota schoolboy, What I Want to Be When I Grow Up, dated March 1985 I WAS LIVING in London in the winter of 1984, finishing a master39。 s degree in economics at the London School of Economics, when I received an invitation to dine with the queen mother. It came through a distant cousin of mine who, years before, and somewhat improbably, had married a German baron. Though I was not the sort of person regularly invited to dine at St. James39。 s Palace, the baroness, happily, was. I rented a black tie, boarded the tube, and went. This event was the first link in a chain of improbabilities, culminating in a job offer from Salomon Brothers. What had been advertised as a close encounter with British royalty proved to be a fund raiser with seven or eight hundred insurance salesmen. We fanned out across the Great Hall in dark wooden chairs on wine red carpets beneath sooty portraits of the royal family, as if auditioning to be extras on Masterpiece Theatre. Somewhere in the Great Hall, as luck would have it, were two managing directors from Salomon Brothers. I knew this only because, as luck would further have it, I was seated between their wives. The wife of the more senior Salomon Brothers managing director, an American, took our table firmly in hand, once we39。 d finished craning our necks to snatch a glimpse of British royalty. When she learned that I was preparing to enter the job market and was considering investment banking, she turned the evening into an interview. She prodded, quizzed, needled, and unsettled me for about an hour until finally she stopped, satisfied. Having examined what good had e from my twentyfour years on earth, she asked why I didn39。 t e and work on the Salomon Brothers trading floor. I tried to keep calm. I was afraid that if I appeared too eager, it might dawn on the woman she had made a terrible mistake. I had recently read John Gutfreund39。 s now legendary ment that to succeed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning ready to bite the ass off a bear. That, I said, didn39。 t sound like much fun. I explained to her my notion of what life should be like inside an investment bank. (The description included a big glass office, a secretary, a large expense account, and lots of meetings with captains of industry. This occupation does exist within Salomon Brothers, but it is not respected. It is called corporate finance. It is different from sales and trading, though both are generally referred to as investment banking. Gutfreund39。 s trading floor, where stocks and bonds are bought and sold, is the roughandtumble center of moneymaking and risk taking. Traders have no secretaries, offices, or meetings with captains of industry. Corporate finance, which services the corporations and governments that borrow money, and that are known as clients, is, by parison, a refined and unworldly place. Because they don39。 t risk money, corporate financiers are considered wim。