Michael Lewis made a name for himself in the mid-1980s by having impeccable judgment in the markets. He was a 24-year-old rookie at Solomon Brothers in 1985, just before the last big Wall Street debacle.

He made a new name for himself just four years later, when he published the now canonized book Liar's Poker, in which he recounted his experience as one of those young men who, despite some early luck, had no idea what he was doing.

"Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud," he writes in "The End," a piece for Portfolio Magazine published last month. "Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money, would be expelled from finance."

Now he looks back on what's become a decades-long problem. In Lewis's view, this isn't so much a second crisis as a continuation of the first one.

Lewis admits that within months of publishing Liar's Poker in 1989, he was getting letters from aspiring Gordon Gekkos who wanted to know if he had any other advice. "They read it as a how-to manual," Lewis writes in Portfolio.

Maybe this article will finally set the record straight, and at least a few of the next crop of financiers won't let the next 20 years look like the last.

[Image: Ji Lee for Portfolio Magazine]