Hidden Forces

In Episode 118 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jim Grant, founder of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the financial markets.  Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, Jim had thoughts, first, of a career in music, not interest rates—french horn was his love. But he threw it over to enter the Navy. Following his stint in the Navy, Jim enrolled Indiana University where he studied economics under Scott Gordon and Elmus Wicker and diplomatic history under Robert H. Ferrell, and later, obtained a master’s degree in international affairs under the guiding tutelage of cultural historian, critic and public intellectual Jacques Barzun.  In 1972, at the age of 26, Grant began working as a cub reporter at the Baltimore Sun, moving to Barron’s in 1975. The late 1970s were years of inflation, monetary disorder and upheaval in the interest-rate markets—as Jim Grant says, “of journalistic opportunity.” Barron's editor Robert M. Bleiberg, tapped Grant to originate a column devo