Ron Chernow Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

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

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.

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

A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.

Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.

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.

As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.