Quotes from Ron Chernow

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.

Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.

The story of Alexander Hamilton lends itself to hip-hop treatment. Hamilton's personality is driven and unrelenting, and the music has that same quality. The music and the man mirror each other.

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.

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.

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.

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.

Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

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.

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.

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.

The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.

I find that when I come upon something that I think is a historical revelation, I have the sort of adrenaline rush that I imagine a gambler gets in Las Vegas when he hits the jackpot. It's still tremendously exciting to me, and I think all of my peers in the business feel the same way.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

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.

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.

Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant's presidency rests upon posterity's view of Reconstruction.

I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills.

A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.

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.