Complete Family Wealth, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 21Financial Capital

Return

This is not a book about investing in its own right. However, in the context of a family enterprise, oversight of the investment of financial capital is a prominent family activity, which also makes use of and has an effect on the family's qualitative capitals. As such, it behooves us to spend some time on investing as a human activity, and on some of the practices that we have seen families use effectively in their investing.

Investing has been going on as a popular pursuit since the eighteenth century, when certain government bonds became stable and marketable enough that they could be treated as “securities.” It was key to the growth of the middle class, first in Europe, then in the United States, and ...