James Grant

James "Jim" Grant (born 26 July 1946) 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.

He is married to Patricia Kavanagh, M.D., a neurologist, and lives in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn. They have four children.

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.

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.

Grant received the 2015 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in business journalism.

Grant has hosted a podcast since January 2017, titled Grant's Current Yield.

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", 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.”

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. 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.

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.