Description
Wall Street newsletters come and go, but Grant’s Interest Rate Observer has gone on and on. It has enlightened, enriched and provoked Wall Street’s most successful investors every two weeks for the past 25 years. Its thousands of readers treasure it not only for its insights and analysis, but also for its clarity and wit.
This special anniversary collection of Grant’s articles traces the tumultuous events of America’s bubble era: from the dot-com boom of the late 1990s to the house-price levitation of the early 2000s to the subsequent worldwide mortgage collapse. The essays contained herein make up no armchair history, but a living record comprised in the heat of events. They chronicle what happened and why—and what, in editor Grant’s best judgment, was likely to happen down the road.
The “Mr. Market” who figures in the title of this volume is the imaginary gentleman who, on account of some untreated mental imbalance, is prepared to buy or sell shares of stock at radically different valuations almost from one phase of the moon to the next. But there is more to the aberrant behavior of the past 10 years than fallible humanity, as these essays so entertainingly show. At fault, too, are the currencies and central banks in which savers and investors so uncritically repose their trust.
In finance, as this Grant’s treasury amply demonstrates, most everything is cyclical. Ideas, securities, markets, and nations have their seasons. But good writing and sound judgment—qualities present here in abundance—never go out of fashion.
About the Author
James Grant, the founder and editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, was born in 1946, a year of baby-size interest rates. He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies—at Indiana University and Columbia University, respectively—as the gold-backed dollar gave way to today’s paper model, and he served his journalistic apprenticeship at the Baltimore Sun and Barron’s during the 1970s great inflation. Author of five books (four on finance and financial history, a fifth a biography of John Adams), he is the father of four grown children and lives with his wife in Brooklyn.
“When it comes to writing about complicated matters of business, Jim Grant has no equal.”
—Steve Kroft (60 Minutes)
“Remarkable prescience—infused with the author’s generous spirit and rich sense of humor.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jim Grant thinks outside the box—Please read him, listen to him.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb (bestselling author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
“In the past quarter century, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer earned and maintained a place on the ‘must read’ list of every serious student of markets. Jim Grant’s trenchant observations and elegant prose never fail to illuminate and educate. For those without the perseverance to review the superb writing in each issue from the past twenty-five years, Jim Grant offers a greatest-hits collection in Mr. Market Miscalculates.
Read, learn, and enjoy. Happy Silver Anniversary, Grant’s!”
—David F. Swensen (Chief Investment Officer, Yale University)
“Like many other market participants, we eagerly await each and every release of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. It provides a uniquely insightful, astute, witty, and penetrating analysis of key economic and financial factors. Indeed, there is only one thing better than receiving our regular edition—and that is having access to this amazing compilation of some of Jim Grant’s very best writing. I am certain that you will come away from reading this anthology with an incredible grasp of the natural forces, policy decisions, and human abuses that have shaped markets in the U.S. and abroad. You will also gain an exceptional perspective for analyzing what lies ahead. Simply put, it’s a must for anyone that seriously seeks to understand the past, dissect the present, and postulate future scenarios.”
—Mohamed El-Erian (author of When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change, co-CEO and co-CIO of PIMCO, and past president of Harvard Management Co.)
