Minding Mr. Market: Ten Years on Wall Street with Grant's Interest Rate Observer

Grant collected pieces from the first decade of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, the newsletter he founded in 1983 after leaving Barron's, covering the period from the start of the great bond bull market through the early 1990s.

The recurring analytical positions are the value of the collection. Grant writes from a credit perspective, arguing that the price of money determines everything else and that the market's willingness to lend is a better indicator of where a cycle stands than any measure of enthusiasm for equities. He is consistently sceptical of leverage, of financial innovation that claims to reduce risk, and of the assumption that a lender's models describe the borrower's actual condition. He covers the savings and loan crisis, the leveraged buyout boom and its collapse, the commercial real estate cycle, the junk bond market's rise and failure, and the Japanese asset bubble.

The format lets a reader see positions taken in real time with the outcome known, which is the main use. Grant was early on several correct calls and wrong on others, particularly on inflation and on the duration of the bond bull market, and the collection includes both.

Grant's prose style is distinctive, dense with irony and historical allusion, and readers either enjoy it or do not. The specific market situations are thirty years old. What transfers is the credit-first analytical posture and the demonstration that being correct about a cycle's excesses does not tell you when it ends.

Founder and editor, Grant's Interest Rate Observer (since 1983); financial historian and biographer

Grant's Interest Rate Observer is a primary source other investors read and quote, and Money of the Mind is a standard credit history.

Grant's Interest Rate Observer