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.

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

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

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.

A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.

Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.

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