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.
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 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]
^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.
^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. ISBN0-374-16601-3.
^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.
