Speaker

Jim Grant

Jim Grant

Founder and editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a bi-weekly publication he has edited since 1983. One of the most respected contrarian voices in finance, known for applying deep financial history to contemporary markets. Based in New York. Cost of subscription roughly $2,000 per year; widely regarded as essential reading for sophisticated credit and equity investors.

Author of Friends Until the End (2025), a double biography of 18th-century British parliamentarians Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox set against Britain’s loss of the American colonies, the East India Company’s exploitation of India, and the French Revolution. Previous books include a biography of Bernard Baruch.

Known for early warnings: dotcom bubble (1999), dangerous mortgage securities (2008 crisis), post-GFC inflation (warned from 2014, materialised 2021–22). Also known for extended periods of premature bearishness — Grant is consistently sceptical of bull markets, and his timing calls are widely acknowledged as a weakness even by his admirers.

Appearances

Key positions

  • Decadent finance: the current regime, in which Fed intervention forestalls corrections and allows bad actors to persist; “credit being man’s confidence in man” has given way to faith in lawyers and documentation. See Decadent Finance.
  • AI check-writing contest: the AI capex race mirrors the 1990s fibre-optics boom; the demand gap is the diagnostic tell; the crash precedes the productivity revolution.
  • Private equity in structural trouble: capitalised for near-zero rates; “democratisation” to retail is desperation, not benevolence.
  • Bitcoin is worth zero (in Grant’s estimation); “the most efficient price is zero.”
  • Gold: persistent long-term position; 1980 Krugerrand purchase worn as badge of humiliation; current narrative anchored to fiscal excess and political threat to Fed independence.
  • Fiscal excess: the US running 6–7% GDP deficits at full employment; debt from $1T to $37T since 1980; reserve-currency privilege is the strongest counter-argument, but amber lights (2019 repo crisis, March 2020 Treasury dislocation) have already appeared.
  • Decadent Finance — Grant’s coined term for the current market regime
  • Value Investing — Grant’s conservative, historically-grounded approach
  • Risk Posture — permanent defensive posture; contrast with Marks’s calibrated speedometer
  • William Green — interviewer; host of Richer, Wiser, Happier