IT Conversations recently posted an engaging ETech talk overlaying some of the ideas of Web 2.0 on Wall Street. It's worth mentioning for the connections it draws between finance and tech, but something else caught my ear.

In the session, a former Salomon Brothers exec named Peter Bloom casually disparages a book I just finished, Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker. Bloom dismisses Lewis' account of life as a Salomon bond salesman in the '80s as "a novel." That's not an altogether unexpected reaction, as Lewis' portrait of Wall Street isn't all that flattering -- unless you're the type who thinks that it was Gordon Gecko was the real hero of "Wall Street."

But Bloom's dig made me wonder what the response was to Liar's Poker when it came out in 1989 and what financial types might make of it today. Google is failing to turn up anything really insightful about the reaction to the book by the sort of people who are its subjects, but I'd love to be able to read something on whether Bloom's poor opinion of Liar's Poker widely shared by those working in finance. Do young traders pass around copies of it during orientation? There has to be some discussion of that somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.

I have always thought New Orleans is a useful dramatic counterpoint to the rest of the country. It has a different value system. It's not a money culture. It's a family--it's almost more European. It's, "who's your mama? Who's your granddaddy?" I had a moment--this is a very New Orleans moment. Liar's Poker came out. I was whoring for publicity and was sent out to be on every TV show. I was on the Letterman show. And after I was on the Letterman show, people stopped me on the street routinely because they recognized me from TV. And the tour, a week after that, took me through New Orleans. And I went there and I was staying with my parents, doing local media. I went over to the grocery store to pick up something for my mother. And I was walking down the aisle with a grocery cart and a little old lady was coming the other way. And she starts to point her crooked finger at me.

...

And I'm thinking, "I know you, you were on the Letterman show." But she gets closer and she says, "I know you, you're Malcolm Monroe's grandson." I said, "How'd you know that?" "I can tell by your face." And everybody is a celebrity in New Orleans because everybody knows you.