Quotes By Ron Chernow

The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.

After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.

A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.

The public has lost faith in the ability of Social Security and Medicare to provide for old age. They've lost faith in the banking system and in conventional medical insurance.

Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.

Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

When news of the crash came, probably a lot of people in small towns and farms across America felt a sense of grim satisfaction that the sinners had finally been punished for their wicked ways.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.

I don't think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.

I think those who invest in mutual funds want someone else to do the thinking for them. But the fact that they can move the money around the family of mutual funds just through a phone call lets them feel that they can play tycoons.

Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.

The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.

In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.

The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.

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.