After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
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.
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.
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.
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'm sure there are many more people who can identify with failure and hardship in life than with the success of an Alexander Hamilton or a John D. Rockefeller.
I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson's masterly saga, 'The Warmth of Other Suns.'
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.
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.
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.