Wealth & Money Quote by Ron Chernow

A “massive shift” sounds like a neutral line from an economic textbook, but Chernow is really pointing to a cultural power transfer: ordinary Americans stopped treating money as something you park and protect, and started treating it as something you deploy. The sentence is built on a stark institutional swap - banks to brokerage firms - and that’s the tell. It’s not just where savings sat; it’s who got to narrate the meaning of thrift. Banks sell safety and routine. Brokerages sell aspiration, risk, and the promise that you can outsmart the plodders.

Placed in the 1970s, the timing does the heavy lifting. That decade is shorthand for inflation, oil shocks, wage pressure, and a growing sense that the old postwar bargain was fraying. In that environment, the traditional bank account looks less like prudence and more like a slow leak. Brokerage culture arrives as an antidote, offering not stability but motion: returns, strategies, “playing the market.” The subtext is psychological as much as financial: anxiety gets alchemized into participation.

Chernow, a biographer of capitalism’s great protagonists, is also quietly tracing the rise of a new American type: the retail investor as citizen-consumer, with a portfolio as a proxy for agency. The line implies that Wall Street’s later dominance wasn’t merely engineered from above; it was invited in through the front door of the household balance sheet. Once savings migrate, attention follows - and with attention comes influence, ideology, and a nation newly fluent in the language of markets.