About Ron Chernow: Ronald Chernow is an American writer, journalist, historian, and biographer. He has written bestselling and award-winning biographies of historical figures from the world of business, finance, and American politics.
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.
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.
As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.
[Philip's death was] beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.... He was truly a fine youth. But why should I repine? It was the will of heaven and he is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of ...
The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.
Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
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.
A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.
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.
The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.
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.
There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
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.
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.
