Quotes By Ron Chernow

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.