Justice & Law Quote by Ron Chernow

A long bull market doesn’t just lift portfolios; it anesthetizes judgment. Chernow’s line nails the most corrosive psychological effect of sustained gains: the sense that consequences have been repealed. By comparing risk-taking to “crime without punishment or sex without sin,” he borrows the moral vocabulary people reserve for forbidden pleasures. That’s the point. In a boom, leverage and speculation stop feeling like technical choices and start reading as a kind of indulgence - thrilling, socially contagious, and, crucially, self-justifying.

The intent is less to scold greed than to expose the feedback loop between markets and moral perception. When prices keep rising, the market appears to “forgive” behavior that would look reckless in any other weather. Gains become evidence of virtue; prudence starts to look like a failure of imagination. Chernow’s analogy works because it frames risk as temptation: the reward isn’t only money, it’s the intoxicating experience of getting away with it.

The subtext is about delayed accountability. Bull markets manufacture a counterfeit reality in which volatility is muted and bad bets are rescued by the tide. That creates a warped social hierarchy: the most audacious are celebrated as visionaries, while the cautious are treated as timid. His phrasing “seemingly without punishment” is the tell; the punishment is usually just late, arriving as a crash, a margin call, or a career built on luck finally meeting arithmetic.

Contextually, this sits in the tradition of financial-history writing that treats bubbles as cultural events, not just economic ones. Chernow is warning that booms don’t merely precede busts - they rewrite what people believe is safe, smart, and deserved.