The Investors Podcast, Released on 8/20/22

William Green chats with Jim Grant, who’s been hailed by Institutional Investor magazine as a “Wall Street Cult Hero.” Jim is the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, which is required reading among the world’s most successful investors. Famously prescient, he rang the alarm before the dotcom crash, before the Global Financial Crisis, & before the recent surge of inflation. Here, he shares his fiercely skeptical views on the folly of the Federal Reserve, why he refuses to invest in China, why he likes gold, & why he’s bearish on bonds & Bitcoin.

00:00:00 – Intro
00:16:16 – How the Great Inflation of 1965-81 shaped Jim Grant’s views on our current predicament.
00:22:52 – How history shows us that human behavior around money has never really changed.
00:28:07 – Why it’s futile to forecast interest rates, but wise to know what’s happened in the past.
00:35:53 – How the Federal Reserve sparked rampant inflation, why it’s scary, & how to deal with it.
00:49:08 – How central bankers illustrate the perils of overconfidence & the need for humility.
00:56:32 – How the Fed could wreck the U.S. economy while attempting to tame inflation.
01:00:17 – What investment opportunities Jim sees in this high-risk economic environment.
01:04:14 – Why he’s bearish on bonds as a 40-year cycle of falling interest rates comes to an end.
01:09:19 – Why Jim likes gold, not Bitcoin, as a protection against financial chaos & monetary folly.
01:24:58 – Why he adamantly refuses to invest in China.
01:26:44 – What Jim thinks of great investors like Seth Klarman, Paul Tudor Jones, & Bill Miller.
01:28:10 – How to handle the emotional challenge of investing when the stock market is tumbling.
01:30:56 – What we can learn from Bernard Baruch, one of the best investors of the 20th century.
01:34:26 – What you can learn from a classic investment book about the secret of “dying rich.”
01:43:21 – What Jim regards as “the most precious commodity” in life.

James “Jim” Grant is an American writer and publisher and the founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the financial markets. He is the author , most recently, of The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself. Grant’s television appearances include “60 Minutes,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” Bloomberg TV, CNBC and other well-known financial news sources. His journalism has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including the “Financial Times”, “The Wall Street Journal” and “Foreign Affairs.”

  Fed, gold, inflation