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 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 one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.
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.
A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
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.
By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.
In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
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.
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.
A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull 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.
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.
The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
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.
There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
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.
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.
