YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Grant

lines on the record: 110
first: 2022-08-21
most recent: 2022-08-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Here we come face to face with personality and character and vested interest, right? So what would be better for grants than calling another disaster? I could imagine the motion pictures. I could imagine a parade is probably true. Well, I could imagine our circulation going up a lot.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Failures, and companies supply those uneconomic things. Think of the craft beer makers that sold beer to WeWork in the day, right? So there's a whole chain of economic activity that goes to support uneconomic activity. So that's the metaphor for the Yankee the Tablecloth. It's not plastic covering, not plastic cups on the table. This is glassware. And the glassware is made all the more brittle through the feds earlier stimulus.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Notice the Fed has not got that option because the table is set proverbially and metaphorically. It's set with most brittle glassware and the most precious porcelain and bull market champagne flues because of the 12 years of suppressed interest rates which have fostered risk-taking, which have brought forth into the world all these companies because some of them are called unicorns because they come to market worth a billion dollars and generate not much earnings. So the world is full of uneconomic projects fostered through financial stimulants, principally low interest rates, right? So what happens when you raise the rate of interest on companies that need to borrow to stay alive? Well, they can stay alive.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who had destroyed just a little bit of demand at the margin, but not so much as to sink us as a society into a slot. Now, I think for blind to imagine this is to put ourselves in mind of the old college freshman for children initiation trick. And that is Yankee Tablecloth out from under a set table of China glassware and porcelain. Now, if you go on wiki how to investigate how to do this, WikiHow will advise always try it with plastic cutlery cups.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the Fed does in the language of economics is to pursue a course of demand destruction proverbially and trivially inflation. It's too much money chasing too few goods, too much demand in relation to supply. So demand destruction is the thing, right? So you want people to spend less, to want less or want it, but they have to give them less money to do it. How do you do that? Well, you wreck the economy. raise the rate of interest. And so the question before the house is whether the Fed archfit can raise its rate just enough.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the great Austrian thinkers, yes, he Bluefig von Nieses sounds like I'll be conducting the Vietophilharmic. Mises was a great economist and more, and he said, The trouble with what the Fed does to rid us of inflation. So first of all, it overdoes it, thereby causes inflation. So it's like a driver who runs over you with a car. And then to fix the problem. Driver backs up. And runs over you in reverse”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About 1940, and Fred Schwedz has at one point he's the heading of the Japanese, a little wonderful advice. And he says, here's how you can have the pleasure of dying rich. He says, what do you want to do is when everyone is selling stocks you buy. Now, you won't get the bottom and they'll go lower. Pay no attention and then wait. And they go up a lot. And when they go up enough to sell, they'll go up more, but again, pay no attention and repeat. And you have the pleasure of dying rich. And the charming story, and there's a lot of very helpful human truths in this book, but that is about the least possible thing to do for the average human being because we're all carried away by a gloom of the bottom and by euphoria at the top just we're just Perversely wired. It's just the devil himself wired his forfeitance.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. So, right, right. And also, how long is your investment horizon? If you're starting after you're 22 years old, got your first job, you can actually afford to pay no attention to the cyclical fluctuations because you're all the time in the world for things to recover and for compound interest and work. It's magic. That's fine. But if you are either a little bit older, it pays to, oh, okay, so I can help with one thing at least on this lovely podcast, and that is a book suggestion. And the author is Fred Schwed Jr., S-E-H-W-G. Schwed, and the book is Where are the customers' yachts?”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, you know, I've just wrote, revised the preface for the next edition of security analysis, Seth Carmen and I are involved in this project and others. And I was reminded while doing this of how little the precepts, the wonderful, true and logically consistent precepts of Edgar, how little they yielded to an investor over the past dozen years. Because Benjamin Care was all about a margin of safety. But when markets are levitating, as they did in the late 90s, for example, or in Japan from the 80s into 1990, Martin's safety is the last thing you need. If you want to heat up with the Joneses, you have to throw all that aside. So it's not a very comfortable tutorial for a yes, but guy.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's an extreme in this direction as well, and the extreme is something called the efficient Marcus hypothesis, which is a thing. It is held widely in academia. And what it holds is that prices at any given moment in stocks bonds are just where they should be because information is instantly absorbed and processed through the human brain and through algorithms and bots and the like. So don't try to outguess the mark. Just take so no, because that fails to recognize the capacity of humans for crowd behavior and for a mass hypnosis under the spell of the Federal Reserve. So it's a lot more interesting than the efficient markets hypothesis, right? So that's what lends the steel and the poetry into this line of work.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And our story wound up that if the scientists who bissed us were not, they didn't have financial position, they weren't leveraged in the market betting on some outcome, right? They didn't have an options position open. They had no financial interest in the outcome. They were studying this and disinterested academically if they missed it. So we wound up saying grad square thing. So how is it that with people through forests of financial interest, client interest, How any of us solve it given all of the impediments to clear perception and finance? So that's why things appear, I think, get so messed up. Everyone has a different set of perceptions, but the population of people who are paid to have a disinterested perception. It's a very small population. And of course, they are human, right?”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our own ability to self-delusion. I want to digress. So years ago there was a bunch of medical scientists got together to examine a cadaver discovered in a melting ice the Italian Alps. This thing was called the Ice Mint, right? So the greatest heart specialists and physiologists, I mean, the anatomists, people with a scientific interest in the human form came to the relevant hospital in Italy to examine this ice mix, right? And they spent weeks going over it with the advanced tools then available to them x-rays and things I can't go. It wasn't until the very end that someone said, yeah, there's the arrowhead right there. And the relevance of this is, and the ones who missed it were so embarrassed and so humbled. And we wrote a piece about this and the headline was Perils of Perception.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one day ducking strikes out, storms back to the bench, and curses up a blue streak, smashes the water cooler, and Gibson can't stand, he summons Ducking to the end of the bench and points to his batting average, which was two twenty six. He says, Ducky, what did you expect? So similarly to Dame with inflation. What did they expect? Well What they did not expect was the obvious. We merged pieces together by all of us. But the fact that it was not obvious speaks to muscle memory. It speaks to the conceit of the economic forecasting fraternity. And it speaks simply to, I guess, to the foibles of human perception.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed, it subsidizes the lack of production through various rules and regulations when it materializes money as it is never materialized, those dollar bills before, and as it borrows and spends in the space 18 months, as it has never done before, what is likely to be the outcome? And a schoolboy of York would say, yeah, inflation. Notice that Noman said, Of course inflation. There's a baseball story, having a guy say 1968, Bob Gibson was the rating pitcher in baseball, imperious, majestic, and dominating and domineering figures not Gibson St. Louis Gardens. And he played with an infield named Ducky Schofield. Ducky was very good in the field, not much of a batsman. That's the credit term.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dessie, I think, might not exist. I don't know for sure But inflation was consigned to the status of Nessing by a generation of economists who, like preceding generations of economists in 1960s, believed that they had found the philosopher's stone. And they, through their dexterous manipulation of this and that lever of policy, could forestall and ameliorate, as I said, in case it did. Okay, so that was the conceit. To go back to a sporting metaphor, I think that muscle memory played a great part in conditioning everyone to expect everything except inflation. Now, if you simply ask the following question, the answer is going to be, yeah, inflation. And the question is this, what will happen when the government pays people not to work?”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you get to know the name of the umpire, the referee, you know that umpire or referee is not doing a job, not doing her job right. If you got, that person is supposed to be invisible. Game is a thing, right? And not the rules. When the rules are paramount and the arbitrary decisions of the referees are paramount, that is not a game. It means, I don't know, it was a kabuki theater, whatever it is. It's not the game we came to play. And I think that we are not playing the game of enterprise as we ought because the Fed is too much with us.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fed, it's doing the Fed has become ubiquitous. Of course, it's handsy as some politicians we know. It has become like the referee Football game or a soccer game or cricket or baseball.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Own welfare in the world. They all go to work in the boring wanting to do better. They make decisions. So the conflation of these myriad decisions is going to give us a better outcome than the somewhat arbitrary and necessarily ill-informed pronouncements of the former college economics professors who populate the halls of the Federal Reserve. We call this advantage. We call the current standard. We call it PhD standard as distinct from the gold standard or other standards of yesterday. And ages ago in 1930s, I guess not so ages ago, but a while ago. It was an economist named, I think, Henry Simon, University of Chicago, who said that business enterprise ought not to be a speculation on the future of monetary policy. And that's kind of what's become. Everyone has to know what the”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that the Fed believes, I know the Fed believes because they do this stuff, the Fed believes that they can select a rate of interest, a policy rate of interest that will at once encourage maximum employment, minimize the rate of inflation, and keep the financial markets percolating. And I say, many of us say, that rate is known not to God, but to individuals operating in a free and untrammeled market and discovering that where it is price discovery, the phrase is price discovery, discovering a rate of interest, and what makes the discovered rate of interest better than the artificial or the imposed one is the discovered rate of interest is the product of decisions taken by people who have no idea what their counterparties are doing, but they're all trying to maximize”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Desirable because that made people spend and encouraged investment, outlays the like. But the Fed is in business to prevent and to ameliorate if it doesn't occur inflation at Main Street, that wrecks wages, that Wreck's budgets that distorts the values that gets elected officials defeated at the polls. That kind of inflation they don't like. But we got that too. So now here we are with inflation rampant is not an exaggeration. Stock prices still elevated by historical lights. Interest rates, bond yields, and still very low by historical record. So what does the Fed do? Well, it's rather in a quandary, and that's where we stand today.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what followed was one of the most astonishing light shows in the history of central banking. By the time the 2021 came to a close, the broadly defined money supply was showing growth year over year in excess of 20% never foreseen in such a short period. Interest rates collapsed. The speculative fervor that all of this created and this lifting stocks realized everything cryptos, NFTs, everything that wasn't nailed down, nothing was nailed down. It's a massive levitation and everything bubbled, some of us called it. And what also occurred was an undesired inflation on Main Street itself, its cash registry. Well, checkout was down. So the Fed never minded inflation at the corner of Broad and Wall Street's New York Stock Exchange.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be what came to be absorbed, what came to believe is the fed would be there for them. The Fed wanted things to go up, that the Fed would make us rich, and that if perchance, if by accident, if through some cyclical hiccup, the market pulled back, the Fed would make it go back up again. Okay, so this takes us to say, let's take it 2020, well, fast forward 2020 comes. The pandemic comes the falling off of the cliff in March. And what does the Fed do? The Fed, never mind the kitchen sink. The furnace, the plumbing, the furniture, everything in that house got tossed at the problem. So to go into the active voice and the passive voice, the Fed took charge of making sure that this pandemic did not lead to depression.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Announced this was the intention of the Federal Reserve's low interest rate policy. He was going to buy bonds with the expectation others would follow suit. People would pay more for a dollar of those corporate earnings. Stock prices would rise and the rate that profits were capitalized would rise. And people would come into capital gains. They'd feel richer and be richer and thereby spend more. So we used to call this trickle down, but now it's taken by the fancier name. This was the portfolio balanced channel theorem. For Christ's sake, what are you saying? I'm saying we're going to lead by the nose into the stock market, which they did. So that happened in a quantifiable way. So the income part had to do with the mind of the market and the expectations of the market. And what came”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inevitably, it's not so very helpful a train of thought introduced into an investment periodical. I think Kane says something to the effect that if you say something is going to happen in our lifetime, say, thanks. But we don't like Keynes. All right, so two things have happened. One, you can quantify and the other is rather in Koate, but still for that, still important. The quantifiable thing is that In the wake of the Great Recession, central banks of the world led by the American Federal Research decided to stimulate this. They use that verb to stimulate business activity through suppressing interest rates, thereby tending to raise up the prices of stocks, bonds, and real estate. And Benaki himself in a Washington Post opened, I think,”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Federal Reserve today had not begun to think about becoming overvalued in 1996. The elapsed time between having declared stocks overvalued in 1996 and the top in 2000. That was about 50 years of psychological time in coming to terms with all that. So one that's confronted with the old medical school gag that Patricia related to me that everything you learn here. Now, of all the things you learn here, half is going to be wrong. What we don't know is which half, right? Everything you think about markets, half of what you think is going to be wrong. We don't know which habits, et cetera, et cetera. So I want to confess to this tendency, this trait, this weakness, but I also don't want to convey that we have given up trying to do something about helping people.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By that directly, but I have, I think, inherited a sense of deep appreciation of the downside, not so much fear of it, but I kind of relish the idea of catching on to it, of seeing it, and then warning others. It's a sweet line of work if you can do it right. And it was sweet to have been validated in 2007 and 2008 and 2009 with the help certainly of people like Dan Gertner who kind of decoded the horrifically complex mortgage derivatives that we were able to explain to people. But yeah, we also asserted in 1996 or something that stocks were over value. My God, they had not begun to paraphrase.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there are those who do that. But what I have discovered about myself, and it's not a recent discovery, but I've come to understand the depth of how I operate, I think I do my best with disaster. I'm a critic and I'm not a child of 1929. My father was. My father watched his father go broke. His father had no business doing anything in the stock market. The father was a high school educated autodidact who became the dean of music at Penn State College, as it was then known. But he went on margin in 19, I'm sure he got exactly the top on margin in 1929 and lost everything. My father had nothing to do with stocks. Everything reminds him of 1929.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of that is true, and I don't want to say that I don't want to speak for others by asserting that no one can do that. There are people who have made a fabulous living on Wall Street by not getting everything correct, by having such a tactile sense about the ebbs and flows of cycles and about the interior of the market's mind to kind of reading the psychology of the marketplace.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, not a dogmatic rendering or overlay of the past and future. I use this word dogmatized a lot because I hear people, especially in the months who are not 75 and a half, say things as if they knew them. I see myself in a lot of this. I hear people say, here's the way it's going to happen. And sometimes the right which only makes it worse. But again, you can't cop out and say, well, you know, we'll know more next year”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The present about the way people themselves are expecting the future to unfold, which everyone thinks one thought you have an edge because you can investigate the alternative, as often as not the idea that's most popular is the Eastern humorism, not always, but often. So it's like you can walk into a doctor's office and the doctor will say, well, no, the test does not look very good. That's disturbing. What do we do about that? He said, well, we really can't tell very much. We can kind of handicap the odds a little bit. Thanks. That's kind of Wall Street, too, right? We can't know the future, but we can't handicap the odds based upon some knowledge of the past.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a closed book, isn't it? And one can pretend. And at intervals over the course of the almost 39 years now, I've been doing this with considerable help, by the way. But over the course of these nearly 39 years, I have sometimes given in to bouts of delusion. So strong can one's conviction become about a certain stock or bond or market that one yields to an unbecoming and certainly mostly unprofitable dogmatism. But just as you say, William, markets are about the future, and if you can't know the future, you must contribute something to the difficult but necessary job of imagining it. It dogmatized about it. You can conceive a view of it based upon the alignment of forces.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She went to medical school. We had to only four, it seemed like 40 kids, but she didn't, and she got, she graduated from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine at the age of 40.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the revenue problem persists. I don't think I took a salary until like 1987 or something. So the world had enough to read, as it turned out, even then had enough to read. And Patricia, in addition to, she had four kids by the time I took a salary. But she was working at the Leon brothers, which so long ago was that the Lehon Brothers was still solid. Yeah, and it paid her a good salary as an investment banker. So she supported all of us as grants came into its own or began to come into its own.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's crash. I'm so sorry. I mispronounce your name as well at the start. I was thinking bankruptcy. But Patricia, my wife and I were first movers in the automated spreadsheet called Lotus 123 that my technophilia ended about 1983 year it began. We were capable of generating the most implausibly bullish projections by putting in what turned out to be the most impossible assumptions that we assume. I don't know. My readership and Baron's was $150,000. So I figured if only half of those subscribed. Half that you would have major tax problems before. Yeah. So we did not have, we had no tax problems, but we did have a revenue problem.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one gets a sense that not just in reading badget, but in reading financial history that, yes, human beings change certainly technology changes, but the interaction of people with money is enduring and rather stable. People talk about the efficient market hypothesis. I think people are just as efficient around large sums of money as they are around attractive people of the relevant sex. I was about to say opposite sex.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money abroad, they'll send it to Argentina and they'll lose it. They'll send it to, I don't know, they'll send it to Cuba. And there use it. So they'll take risks. So that's one abiding lesson.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can get It is that interest rates, a topic that does not enchant everyone are critically important and that when you suppress them otherwise manipulate them, you generate adverse consequences they call reaching for yield, somewhat hygienic frames. It doesn't do it justice. What it means is scrounging around in the worst of the leftover remains of the investment markets for things that will return you something on your capital and taking inordinate risk to do so. So Badger taught this lesson. He said John Bull, alluding to the national symbol of Britain, John Bull can stand anything, said Badget. He can't stand 2%, meaning that if you impose an interest rate as low as 2%, 2%, my goodness, has seemed at times in recent years rather lofty. But if you oppose as almost 2% people will send their”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course, the regime was a gold standard. He wrote in the 1860s, 1870s. And it wasn't exactly through him entirely, nor through Viburg entirely, nor through my readings entirely. This must have been a character and a trait or flaw or whatever. I have a lifelong abiding fascination with gold and the gold standard. I admire its simplicity, his elegance, his efficacy. And so all this ideas and these, what we call them, influencers combined to lead me in the somewhat eccentric financial direction I have taken. I say somewhat eccentric, I should say very eccentric.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was died in the wool free market sky who had no use for the state, no use for the Fed, was properly and deeply cynical about the undertakings in the central banking world, and I certainly absorb much of that from him. I also, as a fellow who wears bow ties and he really doesn't have to. I went to the public library on the weekends and I read bound volumes in The Economist featuring the works of Walter Badget, the famed Victorian author of Lombard Street, a book we can talk about if we went inside that's relevant and also wonderful leading articles, as you written The Economist. And I would actually count his words to get a sense of this. I could tell his style and style was marvelous. He invariably had the money market comment in the economist, and he wrote under a”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it was, you know, the smaller the financial stakes, the more intense the domestic politics. You can see it in college English departments. And my mentor, Aaron's, was a wonderful guy named Robert M. Plyberg. Robert M. Plyberg was a And people who have experience are forever pissed off at some level. And Robert M. Liburn combined attrition's modulated speaking voice with a wonderful rich vocabulary in Sadies. And he would storm it in the office and say it in this mildness saying, tell them, meaning the corporate chieftains, to get us the things we need, penny-wise, pound foolish bastards. So he had a way with cliches and away with absurdity. And it was wonderful to listen to him. He enunciated. He's like a stage actor.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They say, and what they say is true that one's first experience in markets and with money is deeply formative and imprints itself on. And the best investors, the nimblest and most successful are ones who can put that formative experience aside, or at least put it in the perspective and not imagine that they must repeat the experiences of their youth and their middle years. And perhaps that experience was too deeply imprinted on me or allowed it to be too deeply imprinted. Under too many mattresses of the years have gone by.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a story of this great inflation. There were, of course, ends and peaks and undulations, and one of the things that happened then that I think is very great relevance today as people were all too ready to declare an end to things when inflation receded. Now, nothing says that today is going to repeat the experience of Nestor, in fact, rather the odds are against that, just simply because history is never so helpful as to repeat itself literally. Otherwise, imagine how rich the historians would be”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was not ready to give up. I said, most we can do is make sure this Steve does not gallop away too far too fast. So then ensued year upon year of deteriorating purchasing power of the dollar, of rising interest rates, of contracting what we call valuations for stocks. The in the price you pay in relation to what the company can earn, it's a valuation. And we express this as a ratio of stock price to profits. Go a price earnings ratio. And during the good times, the stock prices go up and people are willing to pay a higher and higher price for a given dollar of profit. And when inflation hits and when interest rates go up, the opposite happens and people pull back and they're willing to pay less and less per dollar of profit.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“75 Yes, although it became rather, one became rather acclimated to it, I think never wholly adapted to it. But my goodness, the inflation rate had been tripping up since 1965, and the authorities then, as today, said, first of all, we didn't do it. This will pass. And then actually before very many years had gone by, William McChesney Martin, who was then the Fed chairman of the great rhetorical foe of inflation, to give these speeches condemning it and vowing to slay it like a beast. But towards the end of 1967 in close confines of the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committees had the horse of inflation is out of the barn.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thinking, what a peaceful city. So I watched this series with your friend with a sense of every fan watched with immense admiration for the series, but also in my case with a certain amount of humiliation at all. It was such a surprise. I should not have been quite so surprised as police reporter. Anyway, so an opening came up in the finance department. And I was the Warren Buffett of the newsroom having spent eight full months at one stretch and not to mention some of the vacations working on Wall Street.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was a reporter who supposedly knew something about Crime. I had no idea any of this was going on. I must have seemed to the criminals of the city of Baltimore the most pure, innocent.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was at least by far the least prestigious post in the paper. There was a certain amount of kind of fake daring do about covering crime. Although, you know, you've heard, I'm sure, about a show called The Wire.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not then. Not then. That what came rather later. But I came out with a fairly good grounding in the principal thinkers of economic theory. And the course was, now that looked back on it, was rather heavy on Keynesianism and monetarism. Bilton Friedman was one of the demigods. Certainly Keynes was in the forefront. And I've come to see the clay feet of both economists and both of acolytes. But the convictions that I have since adopted concerning free markets, I mean, so-called Austrian approach, we can talk about what that actually is. That came a little bit later.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The skepticism and cynicism about Wall Street was attained that gradually and by degree. I was quite open-eyed at Indiana. And what I mostly imbibed in my economic study in Indiana was the history of economic thought, which then was a very serious. Everything happened 15 minutes ago as far as economists today are concerned, which is in part how I make my living is by recalling episodes that people have put out of mind. There's a fascinating name, Scott Gordon, who taught a history of economic thought, which I just loved. And there were others as well who introduced each of them, some of these ideas”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A state conservatory. It was a very good school, especially for horn players. As I drove back from the west coast to the east coast upon my discharge from Navy at Long Beach, California, I stopped by Indiana and I announced one of the virtue along song, one of the virtuosine. I said, I have been accepted as a horn player. And he said, oh, really? I never have been. And that was such a deflating little, and I think that's what put me off music. Anyway, I came back and chose economics on the strength of my six or seven or eight months, whatever it was at McDonald's company.”
2022-08-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH012: Fear the Fed w/ Jim Grant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT