James Grant is an American writer and publisher. The founder of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the financial markets, he is the author of Money of the Mind, The Trouble with Prosperity, John Adams: Party of One, Mr. Speaker: The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, the Man Who Broke the Filibuster, and The Forgotten Depression among other works. His most recent publication is Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian, a biography of the brilliant and 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 2007-09.
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. Success was some time in coming. "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. "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."
However, the publication's signature skepticism served it, and its readers, better in the 2000s. Mr. Market Miscalculates, a collection of Grant's articles published over the preceding 10 years, elicited an appreciative review in the Financial Times. "If Grant could see what was happening this clearly," wrote John Authers of the staff of the FT, "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?" Grant received the 2015 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in business journalism.
