Jim "Bowtie" Grant

From head to toe and toe to head, Jim Grant just seems to drag on forever. Tall and gangly, he is the preeminent financial journalist in the country.  Having weathered through past decades of financial storm, Jim writes, comments, and warns of financial disasters. He has been right, he has been wrong, and most importantly, he has been there. Looking back at past decades of turbulence going back to the 70s, one wonders whether the relentless economy grounded him down to his cloth rack like frame, in which no amount of shoulder padding is able to help.

His glasses, perfectly circular to the point where all the possible digits of pi have been exhausted, sit on his tall, sharp nose. When Jim thinks and squints in search of an answer, his squints convey doubt and anxiety. At the same time, he also wears an oversized colorful bowtie. Its quirkiness makes one take him less seriously, only until he speaks again. Sitting obediently on his neck, the bow tie greeted the room during that hot summer day.

As an intern working at an Investment Management firm, I had the chance to join the analysts and managers in hearing his views. He passed his carefully crafted “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer” around the table and began to talk. Reading from his piece, he could not hide his pride when quoting himself. He would read and stop, looking up for any disbelief conveying raised brows, then resume quoting himself with a faint smirk. To an ordinary American, interest rates matter, but not by that much. If anything, it only seems to be a concern when one looks to get a mortgage to buy a house. However, to these investment professionals, it is everything. It is just a single number, but one that their world revolves, and they would argue your world, too, revolves around. He read his interest rate insights theatrically, as if he were doing a spoken word performance. While odd to many, his dramatic seemed to be the only way to do justice to the respect this crowd had for interest rate, especially the treasury rate. As the fundamental rate that dictates the cost of borrowing money throughout the world and the government’s key tool in combatting the high unemployment rate, the room gave Grant all the attention. 

As an interest rate expert, he has built a long career. Beginning his journalism career with the Baltimore Sun in 1972 and finding his own publication in 1983, Jim has written seven critical books examining current financial topics. Most known for his independent thinking that steer clears of popular opinions, he is a respected expert. Different from the blabbering guests on MSNBC and Bloomberg, two major finance networks, when he speaks, people listen. For 30 years now, he has written his bi-monthly piece, “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer,” and shared his views on interest rates. He is frequently quoted by financial literature and was considered by Ron Paul for his Federal Reserve Chairman candidate. While he has been around for the past 30 years, his skepticism has been drawing the finance community’s attention.

In an ever changing world challenged by technology, globalization, and unfailing surprises, people often look for easy, general, and understandable rationalizations of their world. First appearing in academic papers, then quoted in media, and eventually passed around as if it were the gospel, such ideas provide comfort to the world antsy and impatient for an answer, but they may not always be right. As a result, to the investment managers in the room who are essentially in the business of competing to predict the future, they listened to Grant attentively and jotted down notes. For me, a Finance and Economic student, who has been taught to accept different theories underlying assumptions unquestionably and learn to be comfortable with the instructed material, his words struck me. As he shared his concerns for the world’s unwavering beliefs in employment statistics, interest rate’s accuracies, and the Federal Reserve System’s experimental polices, I realized his every word unshackled me from my deep rooted, yet unproven beliefs. Educating a room of relatively young professionals, he preached on. In his mind, economic models, financial policies, and respected academics alike all need to be reexamined. He warned of the consequence of accepting any conditions as given.

After the booming 2000s ended up with not one, but two crashes, the Dot-Com-Bubble and the Global Financial Crisis, Jim Grant began to develop more of a following. For 30 years, he has questioned everything from statistical errors to the market’s search for convenient truths. Throughout this time, he has been doubted, ridiculed, and credited, but he has not changed. While the debate is not likely to end anytime soon for the questions he raised, they will continue to be relevant. As a seasoned veteran, he does not seek anymore validation for he merely aims to share the truth as he has discovered. That day I discovered what it means to be a professional.