The world lost one of its foremost financial historians and analysts on Friday, when Peter L. Bernstein died in New York.
As an author, editor and investment strategist, Bernstein forged an analytical template for what is now common in the blogosphere, mainstream media and virtually everywhere else that assigns import to the money game: Reading the academic literature and interpreting it for a wider audience.
Bernstein wasn’t alone in deciphering the hieroglyphics of financial economists for the masses, nor was he the first to make obscure research accessible. But few did it better. And in 1992, few were doing it all, at least not with the skill and depth that are Bernstein’s trademarks.
Surely the history of financial education will record 1992 as a minor milestone: the year when Bernstein’s Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street