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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

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.