Michael Lewis, whose “Liar’s Poker” chronicled greed and excess on Wall Street in the 1980s, declares an end (finally) to the era of greed and excess on Wall Street, in a piece for this month’s Portfolio. The cover pretty much sums up not just his story, but all the bad economic news today:

Here’s Lewis on how the financial world in the 1980s seems like such a simpler time:

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

I imagine Lewis’ future readers, a decade or so from now, following his adventures again, this time as he navigates a new financial era marked by echoes of the 1930s.