The Stewardship of Wealth: Successful Private Wealth Management for Investors and Their Advisors, + Website

Preface

Nothing corrupts a man so deeply as writing a book.

—Nero Wolfe¹

Over the years, thousands of investment books have been written. A precious few have become classics in the field, but the rest are long, and probably best, forgotten. Given this ponderous history, even the author himself must wonder whether he may be trying the patience of the reading public with yet another book on investing.

I plead this: I'm approaching the investment challenge from a different perspective than most—indeed, than virtually all—of my predecessors. In the first place, I'm addressing a very special audience—wealthy investors and their advisors. In the second place, the purpose of most investment books is to make us better investors. But this book has a slightly but importantly different objective: to help significant investors to become better stewards of their assets, whether or not they ever become good investors in the professional sense of the word.

Finally, this book, and especially Part One, constitutes a cri de coeur for the importance of private capital in the American free market economy—something too many people, including too many wealthy people, fail to understand. The so-called 1 percent—that group of people whose wealth or earnings place them above 99 percent of the rest of the population—has become a whipping boy for everything that is wrong with America.

There is certainly a lot wrong with America, and some of it involves the 1 percent. But in fact the top quartile of American ...