If you don't understand the Market—how can you understand modern life?
"Nicely written latter-day muckraking in a slick and entertaining debut."
—Kirkus Reviews
Flap Copy (from the Dust Jacket)
Riding the Bull: My Year in the Madness at Merrill Lynch was my first book. It was published by Times Books, then an imprint of Random House, in January 1998. On the surface, it is a memoir about moving from Annapolis, Maryland to New York and working for a year on a bond trading desk at Merrill Lynch’s World Financial Center headquarters. On a deeper level, it is the story of a man who gradually awakens to the nature of the market and its impact on society, and must deal with that knowledge in his own life. As the story unfolds, this enlightenment takes place in expanding circles, from the trading desk to the firm to Wall Street to the nation to the globe. The bull in the title is a double entendre, which begins as “bull market” and ends up as “bull shit,” i.e. the lies we are told about how we should live and how our society works. It is a story of growing disillusionment leading to a light at the end of the tunnel.
Riding the Bull was the genesis of all my thinking on the Market. Many of the key ideas that I would later explore in Is the American Dream Killing You? are found in the narrative. It has some beginner’s mistakes—e.g. it's overwritten in parts—but it rings as true today as when I wrote it. In fact, after more than four years of corporate scandals, scandals that have spread from New York's financial community to encompass not only the breadth of American business but American life in general, it rings all too true.
The belly of the beast: signing books at the base of the World Financial Center—the global headquarters of Merrill Lynch.
