Jim Grant | What’s the Price of Mispricing Risk? Interest Rates, Repo Markets, and an Activist Fed

In Episode 118 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jim Grant, founder of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the financial markets. 

Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, Jim had thoughts, first, of a career in music, not interest rates—french horn was his love. But he threw it over to enter the Navy. Following his stint in the Navy, Jim enrolled Indiana University where he studied economics under Scott Gordon and Elmus Wicker and diplomatic history under Robert H. Ferrell, and later, obtained a master’s degree in international affairs under the guiding tutelage of cultural historian, critic and public intellectual Jacques Barzun. 

In 1972, at the age of 26, Grant began working as a cub reporter at the Baltimore Sun, moving to Barron’s in 1975. The late 1970s were years of inflation, monetary disorder and upheaval in the interest-rate markets—as Jim Grant says, “of journalistic opportunity.” Barron's editor Robert M. Bleiberg, tapped Grant to originate a column devoted to interest rates. This weekly department, called “Current Yield,” he wrote until the time he left to found the eponymous “Interest Rate Observer” in the summer of 1983.  

During his long career, Jim Grant has written a series of books including three financial histories, a pair of collections of Grant’s articles and four biographies, the most recent of which is about the life and times of Walter Bagehot, whose ideas about central banking informed the U.S. Federal Reserve's response to the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09.

This conversation is unusually convivial, even by the normal standards. Demetri and Jim discuss actions by the Federal Reserve in the repo market (including official and unofficial explanations for the turmoil seen in mid-September 2019), the recent WeWork and SoftBank debacle, a possible bubble in the leveraged loan market, and much more. 

During the overtime to this week’s episode, Jim shares information about how he invests his own money (and who he invests it with), delves into some of Grant’s value analysis research and provides insights into his own work process as an editor and interviewer.

If you want access to the overtime or to the transcript and rundown for this conversation, you can do so through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. Subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application. 

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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