Peter L. Bernstein

Peter Lewyn Bernstein (January 22, 1919 – June 5, 2009) was an American financial historian, economist and educator whose evangelizing of the efficient-market hypothesis to the public made him one of the country's best known popularizers of academic finance.

Education and military service during World War II A native of New York City, Peter Bernstein was the son of financial consultant Allen Bernstein and his wife, Irma Lewyn. His primary education was at the Ethical Culture School where, in first grade, he became a lifelong friend of another economics historian, Robert Heilbroner, with whom he later attended Horace Mann School and Harvard College, from which both received, in 1940, bachelor's degrees in economics. A review in the Regional Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston wrote the book is about "the limits of rationality in explaining our choices". A 2010 review by Venkatesh Rao said the "book suffers from a major flaw that almost makes it worthless: it was first published in 1996, with a second printing in 1998. The infamous Black-Scholes-Mertens Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) fiasco and 1998 bailout by Clinton didn't make it into the book... What saves the book is a general tone of rather old-fashioned caution".

In 1992 Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street was published by The Free Press in Canada and Maxwell Macmillan International in the US and has since become a worldwide guide to modern investment theories and practices. Capital Ideas Evolving, the follow-up to this seminal work, was published in May 2007 by John Wiley and Sons.

Streetwise: The Best of The Journal of Portfolio Management, edited by Peter L. Bernstein and Frank J. Fabozzi, was published in 1997 by Princeton University Press.

Earlier books include A Primer on Money, Banking and Gold (Random House 1965), as well as Economist on Wall Street (Macmillan 1970), and The Price of Prosperity (Doubleday, 1962), in addition to two books on government finance co-authored with Robert Heilbroner.

Bernstein's other books are The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession, published in the fall of 2000 by John Wiley and Sons, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, published in 2005 by W.W. Norton & Co.