Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Ron Chernow
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Ron Chernow.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
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.
The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.
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 think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.
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.
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.
By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's a shameful thing to admit for someone who writes such long books, but I read so slowly that I almost subvocalize.
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
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.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
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.
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.
In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
Hamilton was young, dashing, and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical.
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.
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.
Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
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.
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.
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.
The thing with all the Founding Fathers, one of the most common words they used was 'posterity.' They were constantly referring to posterity.
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.
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.
There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
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.
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.
Hamilton was extremely combative. Not only was he combative, but he also overreacted to anything he perceived as a threat or a criticism.
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.
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.
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.
I always sympathize with people who complain about the length of my books. It would take me a year to get through one of them.
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.
There were 900 books on Washington when I began writing on him.
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.
After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.
I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
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.
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.
I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
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 American public historically was really not part of the stock market.
I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson's masterly saga, 'The Warmth of Other Suns.'
Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.
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 felt blessed by the existence of Horace Porter's 'Campaigning With Grant.'
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.
Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
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