2025-10-26
2 小时 7 分钟You're listening to TIP.
Hi, everyone.
I'm delighted to be back with you again on the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast.
Today's episode is an important, timely and extremely thought-provoking conversation with Jim Grant.
Jim, who's a cult figure in elite investment circles, is the renowned founder and editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a bi-weekly publication that he's edited since 1983.
These days it costs the best part of $2,000 a year for a subscription, so it's not cheap, but it's widely recognized as an invaluable source of unconventional insights for sophisticated investors.
Nassim Taleb, who's not an easy man to impress, has written that Jim Grant thinks outside the box.
Please read him, listen to him.
David Swenson, who ran Yale University's endowment with huge success for decades, once remarked that Grant's interest rate observer is on the must-read list of every serious student of markets.
One reason for Jim's stellar reputation is that he draws deeply on his knowledge of financial history to issue early warnings about brewing storms that many investors fail to recognize until it's too late.
He's never been afraid to point out the wretched excesses of Wall Street, those moments when speculative fads get out of hand.
and when unscrupulous investment firms are selling dross that's dangerous to the financial health of careless or credulous investors.
In 1999, for example, at the height of the dot-com bubble, Jim warned that it was one of the most perilous periods in investment history and that America was dangling by a thread, financially speaking.
A few years later, he was one of the first people to warn about the dangerous mortgage securities.
that led to catastrophe in the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2009.
In the years after the financial crisis, he presciently warned that the Federal Reserve's monetary policies would inevitably spark runaway inflation.
So what's Jim saying today?
Well, as you're about to hear, he argues quite forcefully that prudent investors would be wise to exercise considerable caution at the moment, given the heightened risks and speculative behavior that he's observing.
As Jim sees it at this point in October 2025, there are many unsettling symptoms of euphoria, recklessness, folly and corruption in financial markets these days, all of which he sees as potential warning signs of what he calls a major market top.
Now, the reality is, I have no idea if Jim's right and he's not sure either.