James Grant (finance)

James Grant
James Grant
	Grant in 2014
Born	July 26, 1946 (age 77); New York, New York
Alma mater	Indiana University (BA); Columbia University (MIA);
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.

Personal life

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]

Journalism

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 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. 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?"^[5]

Grant received the 2015 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in business journalism.^[6]

Books

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.

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 global financial crisis of 2007–2009.

2012 election

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.^[7]

Bibliography

1983: Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend,^[8] 1997 paperback edition
1992: Money of the Mind, 1994 paperback edition
1993: Minding Mr. Market, 2000 paperback edition^[9]
1996: The Trouble with Prosperity: A Contrarian's Tale of Boom, Bust, and Speculation^[10]
2005: John Adams: Party of One,^[11] paperback edition
2008: Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond^[12]
2011: Mr. Speaker!: The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, the Man Who Broke the Filibuster,^[13] 2012 paperback edition
2014: The Forgotten Depression^[14]
2019: Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian^[15]

References

^ American Book Publishing Record, Volume 44, R.R. Bowker Company. Bowker., 1995. Pg. 300 provides a birth date of 1946 under the book record for Minding Mr. Market.
^ ^a ^b "About James Grant". Grant's Interest Rate Observer. Retrieved August 21, 2011.
^ "Patricia Kavanagh, M.D." Retrieved August 21, 2011.
^ Grant, James (1993). Minding Mr. Market: ten years on Wall Street with Grant's interest rate observer (1st ed.). New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. pp. xiii. ISBN 0-374-16601-3.
^ Authers, John (November 24, 2008). "Profit from prophesies of doom". Financial Times. Retrieved August 21, 2011.
^ "UCLA Anderson School of Management Announces 2015 Gerald Loeb Award Winners". UCLA Anderson School of Management. June 24, 2015. Retrieved January 31, 2019.
^ Baier, Brett (October 26, 2011). Special Report Online: Ron Paul. Fox News (Television production). Retrieved October 27, 2011. He's an Austrian economist, he has experience on Wall Street, he's brilliant, he's a good historian, he would quit printing money.
^ "Review of Bernard M. Baruch by James Grant". Kirkus Reviews. November 1, 1983.
^ "Review of Minding Mr. Market". Publishers Weekly. January 31, 2000.
^ Rothchild, John (November 10, 1996). "Review of The High-Risk Society by Michael J. Mandel and The Trouble with Prosperity by James Grant". The New York Times.
^ Rollyson, Carl (March 9, 2005). "Biography as Sheer Narrative Force". The New York Sun.
^ "Review of Mr. Market Miscalculates". Publishers Weekly. September 22, 2008.
^ "Nonfiction Review of Mr. Speaker!: The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, the Man Who Broke the Filibuster". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved March 24, 2011.
^ Pethokoukis, James (January 23, 2015). "Review of The Forgotten Depression". The New York Times.
^ "Nonfiction Review of Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian". The New York Times. July 23, 2019.