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

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.

In waiting for the glorious moment of that first book contract, writers must have giant reservoirs of patience. Yet they must persevere because they don't know the destiny that is being worked out for them. They creep humbly along the ground, without the spacious aerial vision of their lives that would show them the destiny in store for them.

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

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.

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.

A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.