James Grant Quotations

What the MOVE index measures is the level of complacency or confidence in the interest rate world. The market chooses not to see much risk in anything.

The prudent law of investment is you're never supposed to make a complete decision, no or yes. It's always a marginal one,

Most people thought they'd get beaten by St George and beaten by the Broncos.

On something as important as this, I felt that all the trustees should have input,

I don't know the exact circumstances. He did have some medical problems and was transported to Heartland Medical Center for some evaluations.

He was a very poor central bank chairman. He was passive in the face of what will go down as a very destructive bubble.

He's going to conduct practice until Mike returns, which we hope is tomorrow morning.

He was sitting up in bed. They were doing tests. They weren't allowing him to walk around.

Japan is the perfect living laboratory for the proposition that massive fiscal stimulus is not necessarily going to cause interest rates to rise.

That's the most important thing for any team.

Yeah, jumping off the porch roof and I was trying to catch them, and I was just in shock myself.

It would have felt better. It would have been nice to know.

The secretary told me the kids came in, they were frantic, ... We have a policy; you don't come in here with your cleats on. The kids knew that. It didn't matter. I think they were concerned. Three of the varsity kids came down to the hospital and checked on him after practice.

The teams they've come up against, individually, you probably say have better players than (the Tigers),

People called him clairvoyant, and he never said, 'Shucks, it's not me, it's the cycle -- I am a federal employee. I don't see around corners, and I never have. Don't put too much stock in this bureaucracy called the Fed,'

Anybody who feels indispensable is living in a false world. All you can do is do the best you can.

As far as I know, it was one of those things that was just sudden today.

As an arithmetic proposition in many mutual funds, chances are that by the time the great performance has been registered, you, the public investor, are only entering. You're coming in for the last of it.

Artificially low interest rates change people's speculative behavior in ways we may all come to regret, ... It's already incited a great burst of speculation in the bond market.

They've done a really good job to get this attitude at the club,

As much anxiety as we might extend over the victims of a rising funds rate, we ought to also spare a thought for the consequences of rates having been here in the first place,

It seems to me the least-esteemed asset in existence is cash, short-dated treasuries, and I think that is the asset that is going to surprisingly outperform in the years ahead.

It's not surprising in that mutual fund companies have been making them richer,

They cannot appreciate the full magnitude of their actions. Any time you have a person's mental capabilities that are questioned, it's going to affect how the case is handled.

I have to believe that, more than ever before, some importantly large number of Americans are exposed to short-term interest rates through the mortgage market, ... and an important, dramatic rise in those rates would choke off consumption.

I just do my job. It's a dirty job but I don't care if I get recognition or not.

It's about bums on seats. If nobody wants to listen to what you are doing, it kind of defeats the purpose really, doesn't it?

Nothing beats a little cash in a bear market, of course, and the oldest form of cash is gold.

Debt is always repaid, either by the borrower or by the lender.

It is an axiom nowadays that no bank fails for lack of capital; unprofitable lending is always the underlying cause.

Hope sustains life, but misplaced hope prolongs recessions.

[T]he first bad bank loan was no doubt made around the time of the opening of the first bank.

In general, markets know more than the people who write about them.

Every debt is ultimately paid, if not by the debtor, then eventually by the creditor.

Progress is cumulative in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance.

Credit is money of the mind.

The art of banking is always to balance the risk of a run with the reward of a profit. The tantalizing factor in the equation is that riskier borrowers pay higher interest rates. Ultimate safety - a strongbox full of currency - would avail the banker nothing. Maximum risk - a portfolio of loans to prospective bankrupts at usurious interest rates - would invite disaster. A good banker safely and profitably treads the middle ground.

The Fed can change how things look, not how things are

The 1980s are to debt what the 1960s were to sex. The 1960s left a hangover. So will the 1980s.

I believe that there is an important kernel of truth in the idea that financial errors recur every other generation.

Growth at an exceptional rate is a red flag in banking. It is hard enough to manage an ordinary bank; to control a sprouting weed is well-nigh impossible. If loans are expanding too quickly, the lending officers have probably been saying 'yes' too frequently.

In almost every walk of life, people buy more at lower prices; in the stock market they seem to buy more at higher prices.

To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation's earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.

[C]apitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich.

To me the gold price takes the form of a very uncomplicated formula, and all you have to do is divide one by 'n.' And 'n', I'm glad you ask, 'n' is the world's trust in the institution of paper money and in the capacity of people like Ben Bernanke to manage it. So the smaller 'n', the bigger the price. One divided by a receding number is the definition of a bull market.

Central banks have gotten out of the central banking business and into the central planning business, meaning that they are devoted to raising up-if they can-economic growth and employment through the dubious means of suppressing interest rates and printing money. The nice thing about gold is that you can't print it.

Successful investing is about having people agree with you ... later.

The essential Greenspan legacy . . . is the idea that the Fed will allow nothing to go really wrong.