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

Part One

The Importance of Private Capital

The role of private capital is poorly understood, both by Americans in general and also by the wealthy Americans who own that capital. Most wealthy families take the stewardship of their capital seriously, to be sure, seeing stewardship as the discharge of an important duty to their families. But beyond the importance of wealth to its owners, substantial families can legitimately wonder if private wealth is a positive or negative feature of American life. Families who work hard to maintain and grow their wealth often see their work as an intensely private activity existing outside of, unrelated to, and largely irrelevant to the major thrusts of U.S. society—a kind of fringe element in the American democracy. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.

The building of wealth, the management of wealth, and the deployment of wealth are activities that lie at the very heart of what has made America great. Abundant private wealth is what distinguishes America from other free market democracies. It is the lure of wealth that encourages Americans (and would-be Americans) to develop and implement the ideas that drive contemporary civilization, whether those ideas are in business, science, the arts, education, entertainment, or almost any other activity that we value as human beings.

And it is the creative deployment of wealth that enriches American society far beyond the dreams of other civilizations—including other modern, postindustrial ...