This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 12, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When Vanguard founder Jack Bogle pioneered the Index Fund,

a mutual fund that tracks a specific set of stocks or bonds, he was doing

something revolutionary, giving small investors an opportunity to

cheaply buy into the market. Bogle recently passed away, but it's worth taking a moment to recognize just how substantially

he changed the business of investing and how he gave the little guy a massive leg up.

Cato's Diego Zulawaga comments.

Most people don't know who Jack Bogle is.

He's passed away recently and he was very, very old, he's 89 years old, but Sharp is attack as far as I could tell right up to the end.

And he ought to be remembered, and just correct me if your view differs he ought to be remembered as this one a pioneer in investing and a real champion of getting people with not a lot of money

access to the same kinds of investments that very wealthy people had access to by just dramatically cutting

out costs related to investing.

Is that about right?

I think that's absolutely right. Jack Bogle was the

founder of Vanguard which is one of the biggest fund managers in the world and

he was as you mentioned a champion of the ordinary investor

he looked at what returns ordinary investors were getting in his time in the 60s and

70s

and saw that a lot of the return that people got was dissipated in manager fees, in other

costs, in transaction costs, and that a lot of the return that the market delivered on the US capital stock

wasn't getting to their ultimate owners.

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