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Jim and Seth Klarman have known each other at least since the beginning of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. Jim tells a story of how Seth Klarman interviewed him in 1983 about the publication (what his focus would be etc) before he would commit to paying $250 a year for a subscription.
Jim Grant's father pursued a varied career, including studying the timpani. He even played for a while with the Pittsburgh Symphony. But the day came when he rethought his career choice. "For the Flying Dutchman overture," says his son, "they had him cranking a wind machine."
The younger Mr. Grant, who can be sardonic about his own chosen profession, might say he's spent the past 28 years cranking a wind machine, though it would be a grossly unjust characterization. Mr. Grant is founder and writer of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, perhaps the most iconic of the Wall Street newsletters. He is also one of Wall Street's strongest advocates of the gold standard, knowing full well it would take away much of Wall Street's fun.
You might say that, as a journalist and historian of finance, he has been in training his whole life for times like ours—in which the monetary disorders he has so astutely chronicled are reaching a crescendo. The abiding interest of Grant's, both man and newsletter, has been the question of value, and how to know it. "Kids today talk about beer goggles—an especially sympathetic state of perception with regard to a member of the opposite sex," he says of our current market environment. "We collectively wear interest-rate goggles because we see market values through the prism of zero-percent funding costs. Everything is distorted."
He adds: "I can't explain the world's infatuation with government securities and negligible yields. These bonds and notes and bills are denominated in currencies that central bankers are doing their best to depreciate."
By "can't explain," he perhaps means he recognizes too well a phenomenon he can't justify. The famously lanky Mr. Grant, whom I meet in his office over Wall Street, is a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic of the efficient markets hypothesis. Markets are "unpredictably inefficient," he says. Right now, he sees Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve as a prime malefactor behind the characteristic economic folly of our age (though China is a big offender too): suppressing the proper functioning of the price system. "By flooding the system with dollar bills, I submit to you that he has accomplished little of what he meant to accomplish and he has unintentionally done a great many things he didn't want to do."
Click on the following link for the full article-[online.wsj.com]
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I am VP of Business Development for Sum Zero (http://sumzero.com), the largest community of buy-side analysts; consisting of over 5,900 hf and mf analysts, and over 3,600 extensive investment write-ups. I have prior experience in a value based pe firm focused on PIPE transactions in micro-caps, and at a value based research firm, which focused on smid caps. In my personal portfolio I have outperformed the market by a cumulative ~48% since 3/2008 (inception date). I can be contacted at jacob(at)sumzero.com for sumzero related inquires. My website is http://www.valuewalk.com/ Visit Jacob Wolinsky's Website
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Thanks for the referral to an interesting article