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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.\xa0

Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, Jim had thoughts, first, of a career in music, not interest rates\u2014french 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\u2019s degree in international affairs under the guiding tutelage of cultural historian, critic and public intellectual Jacques Barzun.\xa0

In 1972, at the age of 26, Grant began working as a cub reporter at the Baltimore Sun, moving to Barron\u2019s in 1975. The late 1970s were years of inflation, monetary disorder and upheaval in the interest-rate markets\u2014as Jim Grant says, \u201cof journalistic opportunity.\u201d Barron's editor Robert M. Bleiberg, tapped Grant to originate a column devoted to interest rates. This weekly department, called \u201cCurrent Yield,\u201d he wrote until the time he left to found the eponymous \u201cInterest Rate Observer\u201d in the summer of 1983.\xa0\xa0

During his long career, Jim Grant has written a series of books including three financial histories, a pair of collections of Grant\u2019s 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.\xa0

During the overtime to this week\u2019s episode, Jim shares information about how he invests his own money (and who he invests it with), delves into some of Grant\u2019s 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.\xa0

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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