Politics & Power Quote by Ron Chernow

A “love affair” is doing a lot of work here: Chernow turns the stock market from a cold mechanism into a romance, complete with irrational devotion and selective memory. That framing is the point. He’s not praising a neutral capital-allocating machine so much as describing a cultural habit in which Americans treat markets as both entertainment and destiny. The public doesn’t merely invest; it falls for a story about upward mobility that feels personal, even intimate.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, Chernow credits this mass infatuation with real consequences: it loosens the grip of old money and gated institutions, making risk capital available to people who can sell a future. Entrepreneurs and inventors don’t have to wait for a patron; they can tap a crowd. The stock market becomes a national underwriting engine, converting optimism into liquidity.

The subtext is that this arrangement depends less on sober evaluation than on faith. “Possible” hints at contingency: financing flows when sentiment does. A love affair swings between euphoria and betrayal, and Chernow’s metaphor quietly foreshadows bubbles, crashes, and the whiplash of public mood. The same emotional energy that bankrolls breakthroughs can also bankroll nonsense.

Contextually, this fits Chernow’s bigger project as a historian of American capitalism: demystifying finance by tying it to temperament and myth. He’s reminding you that markets aren’t just numbers; they’re culture performing itself, with inventors as protagonists and the public as both audience and venture fund.