The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
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.
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.
There is no country in the world where it’s as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don’t perform.
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
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.
The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.
A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.
Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won’t have any future.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.