James Grant | |
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 Grant in 2014 | |
| Born | July 26, 1946 |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, publisher |
| Spouse | Patricia Kavanagh |
James "Jim" Grant (born 26 July 1946) [1] is an American writer and publisher. He founded Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the financial markets published since 1983. He has also written several books on finance and history.
Grant served as a Navy Gunner's mate, graduated from Indiana University, and received a master's degree in International relations from Columbia University. [2]
He is married to Patricia Kavanagh, M.D., a neurologist, and lives in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn. They have four children. [3]
He began his journalistic career at the Baltimore Sun in 1972 and joined the staff of Barron's in 1975. He founded Grant's in 1983. [2] Success was slow. "A critic complained that Money of the Mind, my ... history of American finance, was like an account of the interstate highway system written from the point of view of the accidents", Grant wrote in Minding Mr. Market (1993); the book's title referenced the "Mr. Market" concept of Benjamin Graham. He went on: "The same might be said, both fairly and unfairly, of Grant's. Where most observers of the 1980s emphasized the rewards, we dwelled mainly on the risks. In the junk bond, in the reckless patterns of bank lending, in the dementia of Japanese finance, in the riot of the Treasury's borrowing, we saw not the bull markets of today but the comeuppance of tomorrow." [4]
However, the publication's signature skepticism served it, and its readers, better in the 2000s after the collapse of the dot com bubble and the 2007-2008 crisis originating in US mortgage-backed securities. Subscription rates increased sharply for Grant's Interest Rate Observer, and Grant declined several offers to buy the publication, preferring to remain a small and independent publication. [5] Mr. Market Miscalculates (2008), a collection of Grant's articles published over the preceding 10 years, elicited an appreciative review in the Financial Times . John Authers wrote of the staff of the FT: "If Grant could see what was happening this clearly ... and warn of it in a well-circulated publication, how did the world's financial regulators fail to avert the crisis before it became deadly, and how did the rest of us continue to make the irrational investing decisions that make Mr. Market behave the way he does?" [6]
Grant received the 2015 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in business journalism. [7]
Grant has hosted a podcast since January 2017, titled Grant's Current Yield. [8]
In October 2017, Grant's Interest Rate Observer published an article by Grant and Evan Lorenz sharply critical of Bridgewater Associates, the hedge fund created by Ray Dalio. The article claimed Bridgewater engaged in questionable practices such as potential conflicts of interests in lending money to auditing firm KPMG and having 91 former Bridgewater employees working at Bank of New York Mellon, the custodial bank for Bridgewater. The article became "the talk of Wall Street", [9] and Bridgewater denied any impropriety. A week after publication, Grant issued an apology in print and live on CNBC, retracting parts of the story and stating: “Bridgewater is a secretive and eccentric firm and I let my suspicions of that get in the way of our ordinarily comprehensive due diligence.” [9]
Grant was described in 2019 as a "cult hero" with frequently contrarian views and mixed record of predictions, leading journalist Michelle Celarier to write: "Although his views may be wrong-headed at times, Grant's wry, often self-deprecating humor goes a long way toward disarming the critics." [5]
Grant is the author of Money of the Mind (1992), The Trouble with Prosperity (1996), John Adams: Party of One (2005), Mr. Speaker: The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, the Man Who Broke the Filibuster (2011), and The Forgotten Depression (2014) among other works. The Forgotten Depression discusses the severe but short-lived Recession of 1920–1921, which Grant argues recovered so quickly due to limited government intervention which allowed a normal economic cycle to play out.
His most recent publication is Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian (2019), a biography of Walter Bagehot, the influential English banker, economic and political writer, and editor of the Economist, whose ideas about central banking informed the U.S. Federal Reserve's response to the 2008 financial crisis.
During Representative Ron Paul's 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, he named Grant as his likely candidate for Chairman of the Federal Reserve to replace Ben Bernanke whose term expired in 2014. [10]
He's an Austrian economist, he has experience on Wall Street, he's brilliant, he's a good historian, he would quit printing money.
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