"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"
About this Quote
Wall Street in the 1920s wasn’t just a casino; it was a rigged game with a private back room. Ron Chernow’s line lands because it strips the era’s romance away from the ticker tape and puts power where it belonged: in control of information. “Professional speculators and stock pools” aren’t colorful characters here; they’re an infrastructure. Pools coordinated buying and selling to manufacture momentum, then cashed out once the crowd followed. The point isn’t that people speculated - it’s that they did so with structural advantages that made “the market” less a public square than a stage-managed performance.
The phrase “monopoly over information” is doing the real work. Chernow isn’t claiming these operators knew everything; he’s saying they controlled the timing, framing, and distribution of what everyone else got to know. In a decade before modern disclosure rules, real-time data feeds, and a muscular SEC, information asymmetry wasn’t a bug. It was the business model. The subtext is a quiet indictment of laissez-faire mythology: you can’t have a fair market when price is driven by coordinated whispers and selective access.
Context matters: this is the pre-crash ecosystem that made 1929 feel sudden to outsiders but almost inevitable to insiders. Chernow’s intent is historical, but the contemporary echo is hard to miss. Whenever finance insists it’s merely “pricing risk,” he reminds you to ask who gets the first look at reality - and who gets sold a story.
The phrase “monopoly over information” is doing the real work. Chernow isn’t claiming these operators knew everything; he’s saying they controlled the timing, framing, and distribution of what everyone else got to know. In a decade before modern disclosure rules, real-time data feeds, and a muscular SEC, information asymmetry wasn’t a bug. It was the business model. The subtext is a quiet indictment of laissez-faire mythology: you can’t have a fair market when price is driven by coordinated whispers and selective access.
Context matters: this is the pre-crash ecosystem that made 1929 feel sudden to outsiders but almost inevitable to insiders. Chernow’s intent is historical, but the contemporary echo is hard to miss. Whenever finance insists it’s merely “pricing risk,” he reminds you to ask who gets the first look at reality - and who gets sold a story.
Quote Details
| Topic | Investment |
|---|
More Quotes by Ron
Add to List
