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Home
Authors
Ron Chernow
American
Author
About the author
I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Money
#Retirement
After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Years
#Being
#Washington
#Suspicion
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Problems
#May
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Genius
#Financial
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
#Crime
#Sin
#Sex
#Punishment
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Safety
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Love
#Public
#American
#Entrepreneurs
There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#World
#Country
#states
#United
Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Identity
The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Argument
#Safety
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Fathers
#Founding
#Visions
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Money
#Faith
#Worth
#Inflation
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#History
The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Security
#Public
#Ability
#Old
#Faith
#Age
#Medical
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Sound
#Strategy
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Will
#Fear
#Baby
#Retirement
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Time
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
#Work
#Experience
#Retirement
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
#Universe
#Numbers
#Quiet
#Tyranny
#Managers
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
#Sense
#Satisfaction
#America
#News
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Blind
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Writing
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Want
#People
#Will
#Fear
#Risk
#Buying
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Information
#Laws
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
#World
#Information
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Day
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,
American
Author
#Talk
#Relatives
I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Life
I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Past
#Historians
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Want
#Thinking
#Family
#Play
#Money
#Fact
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Security
#Idea
#Retirement
The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Public
#American
In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Rest
By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
#Houses
In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Banks
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Successful
#Past
#Money
#Performance
#Managers
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#People
#Sense
#Boys
Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Responsibility
#Safety
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#American
#Money
#Risk
#Tolerance
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#London
#Paris
#Financial
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#World
#Economy
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Life
#Age
#Fathers
#Founding
#Consistency
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.
Ron Chernow,
American
Author
#Time
#World
#Banks
#Investment
#Corporations
#Finance