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<P  align=center>By Michael Lewis</P>
<P  align=center> </P>
<P  align=center>Author<o:p></o:p></P>
<P  align=center>MICHAEL LEWIS grew up in <st1:City w:st="on">New Orleans</st1:City> and holds degrees from <st1:place w:st="on">Princeton</st1:place> and the London School of Economics. Before joining Salomon Brothers he worked with various degrees of success as a stockboy for a <st1:State w:st="on">New York</st1:State> art dealership, a cabinetmaker, and a tour guide for teen-aged girls in <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>. His journalism appears in many periodicals including The New Republic, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and Manhattan Inc. He now lives in a cottage in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City> with his wife, an investment banker.</P>
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<P  align=center><B >Preface<o:p></o:p></B></P>
<P  align=center>I WAS A BOND salesman, on Wall Street and in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City>. Working beside traders at Salomon Brothers put me, I believe, at the epicenter of one of those events that help to define an age. Traders are masters of the quick killing, and a lot of the killings in the past ten years or so have been quick. And Salomon Brothers was indisputably the king of traders. What I have tried to do here, without, as it were, leaving my seat on the Salomon trading floor, is to describe and explain the events and the attitudes that characterized the era; the story occasionally tails away from me, but it is nonetheless my story throughout. The money I did not make and the lies I did not tell I still understood in a personal way because of my position.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P align=center>That was somewhere near the center of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in <st1:State w:st="on">New York</st1:State> and <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City>. There has never before been such a fantastic exception to the rule of the marketplace that one takes out no more than one puts in. Now I do not object to money... ...</o:p></P>
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