The New York Times Reviews Jim Grant's New Book

Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond gets a thumbs-up from The New York Times, in a review penned by Stephen Kotkin (HT: LewRockwell.com):

Counteracting the uncanny amnesia of the financial world, the bookish Mr. Grant has a wonderful habit of revisiting forgotten or classic works like “Lombard Street” by Walter Bagehot (1873), which defended the necessity of bailout loans by the Bank of England. Mr. Grant disagrees.

His longstanding, consistent, contrarian views are bracing; his prose, fluid and witty. (Subprime lending is dubbed “not one borrower left behind.”) “Great booms,” he wrote in 1999, “produce large abuses, which usually do not seem abusive until after the up cycle ends.” Happy 2009!

In 1999, Mr. Grant also rightly noted that “there is one set of rules for bull markets, and another for bear markets.” Unfortunately, the regulations needed during boom times are instituted only during the downturns.

That last bit about different sets of rules for bull and bear markets reminds me of the time -- more than a decade ago, to be sure -- when I first heard Grant talk and write of "the democratization of credit and the socialization of risk."

A light went off in my head right then. It was like what Warren Buffett said about the first time a person hears about value investing. It's like an inoculation -- and it either takes or it doesn't. It certainly did with me.

Comments

[Robert]

Jim Grant is probably one of the best financial writers out there. He has a way of making very complex issues understandable, without talking down to the reader. (His pounding on about the gold standard is a little tiring, though.)

Jim Grant, Michael Lewis, and Roger Lowenstein are my top three.

[John]

@Robert: No arguments here on your top three financial writers. Grant is tops for me, as any reader of this blog knows. Over the past couple of years or so I've become a regular reader of Jim Altucher's FT column, which appears every other Tuesday.