Peter L. Bernstein Books

In the ancient world, uncertainty was equated with fate. To the Greeks and Romans, chance had no meaning apart from divine will. The oracle at Delphi spoke for the gods; the movements of stars and entrails of sacrificed animals were interpreted as messages about the future. The notion of random even...

From Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

The Renaissance brought audacity—the willingness to question the gods. At gambling tables, in games of dice and cards, thinkers found themselves intrigued by patterns hidden in chance. Gerolamo Cardano, a physician, mathematician, and compulsive gambler, became one of the first to systematize probab...

From Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Before the revolution, finance was more art than science. Investors relied on judgment, not formulas, and the markets were thought to be driven by intuition seasoned with luck. Through most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, theory had not yet caught up to practice. Economists were content to dis...

From Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street

When Harry Markowitz presented his theory of portfolio selection in the early 1950s, he didn’t just introduce a new way of thinking—he changed the very vocabulary of investment. Markowitz asked investors to stop thinking about which securities to buy in isolation and start thinking about how each in...

From Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street

In the beginning, gold gleamed only in nature’s raw adornment—nuggets found in riverbeds, ornaments buried with kings. In the first civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, gold was not yet money but a manifestation of divine authority. The Pharaohs clothed themselves in it not because it could buy b...

From The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession

The sacredness of gold found voice in the myths that shaped ancient consciousness. Greek legends of the Golden Fleece, biblical visions of a golden calf and a city of golden streets—all express humanity’s spiritual ambivalence toward wealth and purity. Gold was divine in its perfection, but also dan...

From The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession