Zitat des Tages von Ron Chernow:
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.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.
Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
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.
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 lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
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.
Strange as it may seem, George Washington's life has now been so minutely documented that we know far more about him than did his own friends, family, and contemporaries.
After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
Hamilton was extremely combative. Not only was he combative, but he also overreacted to anything he perceived as a threat or a criticism.
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.
The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.
Hamilton was young, dashing, and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical.
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
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.
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 mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
I think those who invest in mutual funds want someone else to do the thinking for them. But the fact that they can move the money around the family of mutual funds just through a phone call lets them feel that they can play tycoons.
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.
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.
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
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.
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.
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.
I just have been so surprised and delighted with what has happened with 'Hamilton.' It really has been one of the most enchanting experiences of my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.
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.
A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.
