 After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform. |
| 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. |
| I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled. |
| The American public historically was really not part of the stock market. |
| 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 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. |
| I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole. |
| 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. |
| A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
