Quotes By Ron Chernow

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm dubious about having Social Security put into the stock market. I think that we have gotten very far away from the idea that there's something sacrosanct about retirement investments.

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

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.

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