Quotes By Ron Chernow

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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