Ron Chernow Author Quotations

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 think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.

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.

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.

The mutual fund industry has been very successful at promoting itself in this glamorous way. Mutual funds are actually vast, impersonal bureaucratic structures, and yet they were clever enough to give a human face to the mutual funds.

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.