Tag: Jim Grant

Jim Grant Writes About Confidence Game

I saw this in the Saturday Wall Street Journal and is well worth linking here. Our readers may recall my affinity for Jim Grant’s newsletter which I highly recommend. Jim doesn’t offer solice to the sleepwalkers or comfort to the many human ostriches who buried their heads to this budding crisis. Instead he focuses on the human behavior that got us here:

In disclosing plans to buy a quarter-trillion dollars of bank stock in the name of the American taxpayer, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson harped on confidence. “Today, there is a lack of confidence in our financial system, a lack of confidence that must be conquered,” he said on Tuesday.

What Mr. Paulson did not get around to mentioning was the excess of confidence that preceded the shortfall. Continue reading “Jim Grant Writes About Confidence Game”

Jim Grant on the Financial Crisis: A Full Blown Financial Storm

Bellesouth sent me an email mentioning Jim Grant appeared on 60 minutes Sunday night. I’ve mentioned Jim Grant several times of late since he has been out front of this financial crisis for quite a long time.

Jim knew what the implosion of our financial system would mean and steered his subscribers to safer ground including short positions in certain financial services indices.   As you can see from the story transcript he doesn’t mince words. Here are some highlights:

It started out 16 months ago as a mortgage crisis, and then slowly evolved into a credit crisis. Now it’s something entirely different and much more serious.

What kind of crisis it is today?

“This is a full-blown financial storm and one that comes around perhaps once every 50 or 100 years. This is the real thing,” says Jim Grant, the editor of “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.” Continue reading “Jim Grant on the Financial Crisis: A Full Blown Financial Storm”