James M. Stone was born in New York City in 1947. His father was an attorney and a poet, and his mother, Babette Rosmond, was an author and also the Fiction Editor of Seventeen Magazine. His younger brother is the writer Gene Stone. Stone was educated in the public schools of Pelham, New York, and at Harvard University. In 1969, Stone received his bachelor's degree, graduating with Highest Honors in Economics, and was also elected as a member to Phi Beta Kappa. His academic work was recognized with the Young Prize for the best undergraduate economics thesis, as well as the Goldsmith Prize for best research paper presented to the Graduate School in Economics. Stone later received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1973. He was appointed as a lecturer in Economics by the Harvard faculty to teach courses on the economics of securities markets.
Career
While teaching at Harvard, Stone consulted in the insurance industry on a part-time basis. During this period, he completed six examinations for admission to the Casualty Actuarial Society, and his 1973 paper on the insurance of catastrophic risk became a standard requirement of the CAS syllabus. In 1975, Stone was appointed Insurance Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by Governor Michael S. Dukakis. In 1979, Stone was appointed chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission by President Jimmy Carter. In 1983, Stone finished his term in Washington at the CFTC and returned to Boston. In 1982, Stone founded Plymouth Rock Assurance Corporation. He has been the group's CEO since its establishment. The Plymouth Rock Assurance Group of Companies operates a number of personal lines insurers, specializing in automobile and homeowners coverage in the Northeast United States. It manages approximately $1.5 billion in annual premiums. Stone is also a member of the Administrative Committee of Lindsay Goldberg, a New York-based private equity investment firm. He was on the Board of Directors of The Boston Globe Newspaper Corporation from 1998 to 2006, and he served for five years as vice chairman of GlobalPost, a web-based international news service. Stone was a founder of Cat Limited, a Bermuda reinsurer, and Response Insurance as well as Homesite Group Inc., which is now among the nation's largest home insurers with $1.4 billion in annual homeowners premiums.
Other activities
Authorship
Stone is the author of One Way for Wall Street, a book on the securities industry, and "Five Easy Theses: Commonsense Solutions to America's Greatest Economic Challenges", a New York Times Bestseller and a Bloomberg Best Books of 2016 selection. He has also authored articles on insurance, finance, and economics.
Philanthropy
Stone is the chairman of the Academic Affairs and Commercial Relations Committees of the Board of Directors of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a genetics and cancer research institute. He served for ten years on the Board of Management Sciences for Health, a large international humanitarian health infrastructure provider. Stone is the chairman of the School on the Move prize panel, which awards the most improved Boston public school with a substantial monetary prize each year. He is a member of the Trust and the Finance Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize winning non-profit investigative reporting organization.
Personal life
Stone is married to Cathleen Douglas Stone, a lawyer and environmentalist and the widow of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. They have two children, Curtis and Lauren Stone. They live in Boston.
