By late December 1776, after twenty months of fighting, the American cause looked finished. Washington had been evicted from New York. He had been chased across New Jersey into Pennsylvania with British dragoons at his heels. He wrote to one of his brothers: “I think the game is pretty near up.”
Then he took the army back across the Delaware on Christmas night, through a howling nor’easter, and hit the surprised Hessian garrison at Trenton. A week later he outflanked the British in the dark and destroyed their rear-guard brigade at Princeton.
He did not win by winning. He won by still being there in the spring.
The soldier who was actually at Brooklyn
Joseph Plumb Martin was fifteen when he enlisted in the Connecticut militia in June 1776. He was a preacher’s son. He survived Brooklyn, Kip’s Bay and Harlem Heights, all inside what is now New York City.
He served six years, through Germantown, Valley Forge, Monmouth and Yorktown, and rose to sergeant. He published his memoir anonymously in 1830 and it promptly fell into obscurity. Somebody reprinted it in 1962.
He was not sentimental about any of it. He wrote that veterans were turned adrift like old worn-out horses once the country had its independence. Survival was the entire strategy, and nobody involved found it romantic.
Nathanael Greene, who supplied the line at the top of this page, was a lapsed Quaker and a former foundry owner from Rhode Island with almost no military experience. He became Washington’s most trusted lieutenant. He took the thankless quartermaster job at Valley Forge in 1778. In late 1780 he went back to field command in the South, where he lost virtually every battle he fought and exhausted his opponent anyway.
Three trillion dollars sitting still
Retail money-market funds hold over $3 trillion, hovering near a record, per the Investment Company Institute. That does not count the trillions of institutional dollars. The money flooded in during 2022, when the Fed ended near-zero rates and yields climbed above 5%.
Those funds now yield about 3.49% on average, per Crane Data. That is a real return on cash, and it is not nothing.
The Aug. 13 Journal quoted Don Ross, a 75-year-old retired airline pilot. He keeps 85% of his money in stocks. The rest sits in a money-market fund yielding 3.62%.
Ross looked at historical bear markets and concluded they usually do not run longer than three years. So he holds enough cash to fund three years of spending, and sells stock to refill it. That is Washington’s arithmetic written out as a withdrawal plan.
The other wall, and the man who ignored it
Retreat has a price, and it is enormous. About $5.6 trillion, roughly a tenth of Americans’ liquid wealth, sits in low-yielding bank deposits. Spencer Jakab reported that in the May 29 Journal, along with the numbers below.
| $5,000 invested every year, 1980 to 2023 | Ending value |
|---|---|
| Perfect timing, every single year | nearly $5.6 million |
| Worst possible timing, every single year | $4.3 million |
| Left in cash the whole time | $350,000 |
Read that twice. Perfect timing beat terrible timing by about 30%. Terrible timing beat cash by more than twelve times over. Timing is a rounding error next to participation.
Money funds also take their biggest inflows right after selloffs, which is usually just before the strongest runs. Morningstar’s Mind the Gap study found U.S. fund investors earned 1.2 percentage points a year less than the funds they owned.
Now the opposite failure. Victor Niederhoffer died on Aug. 4, 2026, at 82, and was born in Brooklyn, which this piece did not plan. Harvard, a Chicago doctorate, U.S. squash titles starting in 1966. George Soros hired him to manage money, and he reported a fifteen-year run of 35% annual returns.
In 1997 he bet heavily on Thai stocks with his money, his investors’ money, and money borrowed on margin. The collapse cost him his fund, much of his wealth and his reputation. He came back in the early 2000s at nearly 50% a year, then blew up again in 2007 with losses above 70%. He never managed a hedge fund again.
Leverage did not make him wrong. It removed his ability to be wrong temporarily. A cash reserve buys exactly that ability, and nothing else.
One last figure, from the other direction. Berkshire Hathaway ended June 2026 with $364.7 billion in cash and Treasury bills, down 4% in three months and the first such decline in four years. It spent $6.8 billion on Taylor Morrison Home and $10 billion on Alphabet. A war chest only helps if you eventually spend it.