With joint-stock corporations, investors can place bets on the success of many different companies, without having to play a central management role in any one of them. This allows investors to diversify their financial holdings. It also allows them to capture profits on their investments, without having to get involved in the dirty, troublesome business of actually running a company.
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Part 2, Chapter 7, Companies, Owners, and Profit, p. 91Jim Stanford
The practice of creating chartered joint-stock companies of a modern type seems to have begun at the commencement of the seventeenth century; and the formation of the East India Company is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, examples. At first, it appears, the 'joint stock' of the company was separately made up for each ship; perhaps for each voyage. But, in the year 1612 the Company made the momentous resolve to have one joint stock for the whole of its affairs, and thus inaugurated a new epoch. The East India Company, or Companies, (for there were two of them), were followed by the Hudson's Bay Company (1670), the existence of which was recognized by statute in 1707, and by the Bank of England and the notorious South Sea Company.
Edward Jenks
There’s no denying that a collapse in stock prices today would pose serious macroeconomic challenges for the United States. Consumer spending would slow, and the U.S. economy would become less of a magnet for foreign investors. Economic growth, which in any case has recently been at unsustainable levels, would decline somewhat. History proves, however, that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.
Ben Bernanke
The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.
Karl Marx
But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street ? a community in which quality control is not prized ? will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.
Warren Buffett
The principal role of the mutual fund is to serve its investors.
John Bogle
Stanford, Jim
Stangl, Franz
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