Quotes By Ron Chernow

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

You don't want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don't want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk.

As a bull market continues, almost anything you buy goes up. It makes you feel that investing in stocks is a very easy and safe and that you're a financial genius.

Partly because his life ended before the age of 50, Hamilton was defined by the other founding fathers, and he managed, with amazing consistency, to alienate most of them.

One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.

Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.

I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.

If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan, the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations, governments, and to extremely wealthy individuals.

What I find very interesting about the mutual funds managers is that here are people who are the new masters of the universe. They're managing billions, yet they're subject to this quiet daily tyranny of numbers.

Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.

As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.

That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.

We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.

The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.

Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.

In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

One of the special characteristics of New York is that it is different from a London or a Paris because it's the financial capital, and the cultural capital, but not the political capital.

Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.

There were two qualities about the mutual funds of the 1920s that made them extremely speculative. One was that they were heavily leveraged. Two, mutual funds were allowed to invest in other mutual funds.

When the market is just going up, up, and up, we all tend to be blind to the holes in the market. They're all papered over by the rise.

The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.