Americans have always loved risk-takers, the man or woman with ambition and vision who goes for broke. “Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength and its greatness,” Tocqueville wrote as he surveyed the nation’s business landscape well over a century ago. Although American business and financial life reminded this French observer of “a vast lottery,” he marveled at the extent to which Americans “encourage and do honor to boldness in commercial speculations.”.
