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.
In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
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 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.
I think there’s a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
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.
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don’t necessarily offer safety and diversification.
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.
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.
If Washington expected relief from Hamilton badgering him for an appointment, he soon learned otherwise. Hamilton was fully prepared to become a pest.
Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed” and “A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.
In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.
Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.
The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel.
He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that “no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.” If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end “that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.”34.
The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.