Without a careful and purposeful control of operations to maintain their professionalism and ethicality, and without a strong indicator of ethical values and their importance at the top of an organization, the lower levels of the organization are all but certain to devolve into a chaos that brings out the lowest common denominators in human behavior. As Lewis notes in a later rumination about his book, however, these lessons don't really appear to have been learned. The fact that CEOs at Wall Street investment firms still have massive (actually, far more massive) salary and benefits packages as did their 1980 counterparts while still failing to appreciate the risks that their investors are taking or the reasons (or lack of reason) that exist behind those risks has made Lewis' book "quaint" in its observations, which were still new at the time of the book's publication (Magee, par. 3). Wall Street is essentially still a cabal of largely sophomoric individuals, it would seem, or at least they treat other people's money in quite the same cavalier type of manner that the sophomores of Liar's...

Rather than maintaining greater control over the organizations that handle their money, investors continue to fork it over in the attempt to watch it grow faster than it has any right to. The problem, then, is exactly the same one at every level of the system and step of the process: greed.
Conclusion

In Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis tells a story that is at once personal and highly detached. It is an immensely enjoyable read, especially for a piece of non-fiction about the financial world, and this is in large part due to the larger-than-life characters that Lewis populates the book with. It is only when it is remembered that these characters are real and that they collectively control the world's economy that the book becomes less engaging and more sobering.

References

Lewis, M. (1990). Liar's Poker. New York: Penguin.

Magee, C. (2008). Dealing another hand of Liar's Poker. Accessed 2 December 2010. http://www.themillions.com/2008/11/dealing-another-hand-of-liar-poker_9727.html