I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

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.

In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

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.

A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton's 'thesis on discretion' written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.)

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.