A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.

When the great bull market began, many more of the mutual funds were investing in the big blue chip companies, so it seemed like a safe cross-section of companies that were very safe buys.

There's a very powerful dynamic that sets in as any bull market continues. And the longer the bull market continues, the more powerful the dynamic.

The mutual fund industry has been very successful at promoting itself in this glamorous way. Mutual funds are actually vast, impersonal bureaucratic structures, and yet they were clever enough to give a human face to the mutual funds.

Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.

I'm dubious about having Social Security put into the stock market. I think that we have gotten very far away from the idea that there's something sacrosanct about retirement investments.

We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.

Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.

A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.