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Peter Lewyn Bernstein (January 22, 1919 – June 5, 2009) was an American financial historian, economist and educator whose evangelizing of theefficient-market hypothesis to the public made him one of the country's best known popularizers of academic finance.[1]
A native ofNew York City, Peter Bernstein was the son of financial consultant Allen Bernstein and his wife, Irma Lewyn. His primary education was at theEthical Culture School where, in first grade, he became a lifelong friend of another economics historian,Robert Heilbroner, with whom he later attendedHorace Mann School andHarvard College, from which both received, in 1940,bachelor's degrees in economics.[1] Following Harvard, where he was elected toPhi Beta Kappa and graduatedmagna cum laude, came service as a member of the research staff at theFederal Reserve Bank of New York and, in a civilian capacity, at theOffice of Strategic Services in Washington. In the aftermath of the December 7, 1941Pearl Harbor attack, he joined theAir Force and rose to the rank of captain, assigned to theOffice of Strategic Services in theEuropean theater.[1]
In 1951, after teaching economics atWilliams College and a five-year stint in commercial banking, Bernstein took over, at family insistence, the management of his late father'swealth management firm, Bernstein-Macaulay Inc.,[1] where he personally managed billions of dollars of individual and institutional portfolios. The assets under his management had grown more than tenfold by the time the firm was sold in 1967 and he resigned in 1973 to launch Peter L. Bernstein, Inc. and, a year later, to become the first editor ofThe Journal of Portfolio Management, a widely read scholarly financial publication for investment managers and academics. He continued as consulting editor of theJournal and served on the advisory panel ofRobert D. Arnott's investment management firm,Research Affiliates.
Bernstein served for many years on the Visiting Committee to the Economics Department at Harvard University, as a Trustee and member of the Finance Committee of the College Retirement Equities Fund (CREF), and as a Trustee of the Investment Management Workshop sponsored by the Association for Investment Management & Research (AIMR), and had been lecturing widely throughout the United States and abroad on risk management, asset allocation, portfolio strategy, and market history.
A longtime resident ofManhattan, Peter Bernstein was 90 years old when he died ofpneumonia atNewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital, after having broken a hip. His first wife, Shirley, died in 1971 and he is survived by his second wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1972.
Bernstein was the author of ten books in economics and finance as well as countless articles in professional journals such asHarvard Business Review,Financial Analysts Journal and, in the popular press,The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal,Worth magazine andBloomberg, among others, and has contributed to collections of articles published byPerseus and FT Mastering, among others.
Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, was published byJohn Wiley & Sons in September 1996 and won theEdwin G. Booz Prize for the most insightful, innovative management book published in 1996. In 1998, it was awarded the Clarence Arthur Kulp/Elizur Wright Memorial Book Award from The American Risk and Insurance Association (ARIA) as an outstanding original contribution to the literature of risk and insurance. The book has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide.
In 1992Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street was published byThe Free Press in Canada andMaxwell Macmillan International in the US and has since become a worldwide guide to moderninvestment theories and practices[broken anchor].Capital Ideas Evolving, the follow-up to this seminal work, was published in May 2007 byJohn Wiley and Sons.
Streetwise: The Best of The Journal of Portfolio Management, edited by Peter L. Bernstein andFrank J. Fabozzi, was published in 1997 byPrinceton University Press.
Earlier books includeA Primer on Money, Banking and Gold (Random House 1965), as well asEconomist on Wall Street (Macmillan 1970), andThe Price of Prosperity (Doubleday, 1962), in addition to two books on government finance co-authored withRobert Heilbroner.
Bernstein's other books areThe Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession, published in the fall of 2000 byJohn Wiley and Sons,Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, published in 2005 byW.W. Norton & Co.
Peter Bernstein received three major awards from the CFA Institute, the key organization for investment managers and analysts:
