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.
Ron Chernow
Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
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.
After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.
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.
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.
Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant's presidency rests upon posterity's view of Reconstruction.
The American public historically was really not part of the stock 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.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
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 find that when I come upon something that I think is a historical revelation, I have the sort of adrenaline rush that I imagine a gambler gets in Las Vegas when he hits the jackpot. It's still tremendously exciting to me, and I think all of my peers in the business feel the same way.
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.
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.
It's a shameful thing to admit for someone who writes such long books, but I read so slowly that I almost subvocalize.
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.
Politics boils down to the stories we tell ourselves. And unfortunately, we tell ourselves different stories.
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.
A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
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.
As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills.
The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.
I'm sure there are many more people who can identify with failure and hardship in life than with the success of an Alexander Hamilton or a John D. Rockefeller.
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.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
I felt blessed by the existence of Horace Porter's 'Campaigning With Grant.'
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
Hamilton was young, dashing, and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical.
I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
The story of Alexander Hamilton lends itself to hip-hop treatment. Hamilton's personality is driven and unrelenting, and the music has that same quality. The music and the man mirror each other.
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.
Hamilton had a certain social versatility, and in a way, that is understandable because he's someone who rises up from the lowest rungs of society and then scales the top. And he gets to know people from every strata along the way.
Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.
I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
I never imagined that Hamilton would be turned into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical. I think I can safely say that that's the last thing I would have expected.
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.
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.
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 one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.
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.
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.
By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.
