James Grant

James Grant’s story of America’s last governmentally untreated depression: A bible for conservative economists, this “carefully researched history…makes difficult economic concepts easy to understand, and it deftly mixes major events with interesting vignettes” (The Wall Street Journal). In 1920-1921, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding met a deep economic slump by seeming to ignore it, implementing policies that most twenty-first century economists would call backward. Confronted with plunging prices, wages, and employment, the government balanced the budget and, through the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates. No “stimulus” was administered, and a powerful, job-filled recovery was under way by late 1921. Yet by 1929, the economy spiraled downward as the Hoover administration adopted the policies that Wilson and Harding had declined to put in place. In The Forgotten Depression, James Grant “makes a strong case against federal intervention during economic downturns” (Pittsburgh Tribune Review), arguing that the well-intended White House-led campaign to prop up industrial wages helped turn a bad recession into America’s worst depression. He offers examples like this, and many others, as important strategies we can learn from the earlier depression and apply today and to the future. This is a powerful response to the prevailing notion of how to fight recession, and “Mr. Grant’s history lesson is one that all lawmakers could take to heart” (Washington Times).

1921: The Crash That Cured Itself

The Forgotten Depression

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Lights and Shadows of London Life, by the Author of 'Random Recollections of the Lords and Commons'

The Yellow Frigate, by James Grant

Bernard Baruch was a self-made millionaire, legendary stock trader, and venture investor. For most of the first half of the 20th century, he epitomized the good side of Wall Street in the public mind. Celebrated as Adviser to Presidents and The Park Bench Statesman, he also became known as The Man Who Sold out before the Crash. James Grant’s much praised biography draws on a wealth of previously untapped material.

The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend

Bernard Baruch

Why is America in financial crisis today? This book, better than any to date, explains it all-how we got here and where we are going. The how we got here is brilliantly described in a collection of pieces from Grant's Interest Rate Observer, the Wall Street insider's Bible. The where we are going is treated in Jim Grant's up-to-the-minute introduction. No fan of Greenspan or Bernanke, Grant tells the unvarnished truth about America.

The Bubble Years and Beyond

Mr. Market Miscalculates

The Yellow frigate; or, The three sisters

The definitive biography of one of the most brilliant and influential financial minds—banker, essayist, and editor of the Economist. During the upheavals of 2007–09, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of a Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man of letters, inventor of the Treasury bill, and author of Lombard Street, the still-canonical guide to stopping a run on the banks, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that—decades later—inspired the radical responses to the world’s worst financial crises. Born in the small market town of Langport, just after the Panic of 1825 swept across England, Bagehot followed in his father’s footsteps and took a position at the local family bank—but his influence on financial matters would soon spread far beyond the county of Somerset. Persuasive and precocious, he came to hold sway in political circles, making high-profile friends, including William Gladstone—and enemies, such as Lord Overstone and Benjamin Disraeli. As a prolific essayist on wide-ranging topics, Bagehot won the admiration of Matthew Arnold and Woodrow Wilson, and delighted in paradox. He was also a misogynist, and while he opposed slavery, he misjudged Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. As editor of the Economist, he offered astute commentary on the financial issues of his day, and his name lives on in an eponymous weekly column. He has been called "the Greatest Victorian." In James Grant’s colorful and groundbreaking biography, Bagehot appears as both an ornament to his own age and a muse to our own. Drawing on a wealth of historical documents, correspondence, and publications, Grant paints a vivid portrait of the banker and his world.

Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

The 1980s witnessed a lemming-like rush into the sea of debt on the part of the American industrial and financial communities, with consequences we are only beginning to appreciate. But the speculative frenzy of the eighties didn't just happen. It was the culmination of a long cycle of slow relaxation of credit practices--the subject of James Grant's brilliant, clear-eyed history of American finance. Two long-running trends converged in the 1980s to create one of our greatest speculative booms: the democratization of credit and the socialization of risk. At the turn of the century, it was almost impossible for the average working person to get a loan. In the 1980s, it was almost impossible to refuse one. As the pace of lending grew, the government undertook to bear more and more of the creditors' risk--a pattern, begun in the Progressive era, which reached full flower in the "conservative" administration of Ronald Reagan. Based on original scholarship as well as firsthand observation, Grant's book puts our recent love affair with debt in an entirely fresh, often chilling, perspective. The result is required--and wickedly entertaining--reading for everyone who wants or needs to understand how the world really works. "A brilliantly eccentric, kaleidoscopic tour of our credit lunacy. . . . A splendid, tooth-gnashing saga that should be savored for its ghoulish humor and passionately debated for its iconoclastic analysis. It is a fitting epitaph to the credit binge of the '80s."--Ron Chernow, The Wall Street Journal.

How the 1980s Got That Way

Money of the Mind

Traces the history of a New York office building to argue that one of the strengths of capitalism is that when economic booms lead inevitably to busts, the system is prepared to take advantage of its failures

The Loss of Fear, the Rise of Speculation, and the Risk to American Savings

The Trouble with Prosperity

Letty Hyde's Lovers, Or, The Household Brigade

Vol. 3

Only an Ensign: A Tale of the Retreat from Cabul

The Bench and the Bar

The bench and the bar, by the author of 'Random recollections'.

Bench

A romantic novel that follows the intertwined lives and loves of a group of aristocratic families in Victorian England, from youthful infatuation to mature passion and enduring devotion. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

First Love and Last Love

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

in large print

The Phantom Regiment; Or, Stories of "Ours"

Volume 2 - in large print

The Master of Aberfeldie; In Three Volumes

Home

Our Heavenly Home; Or, Glimpses of the Glory and Bliss of the Better World

An Inquiry Into the Nature of Zemindary Tenures in the Landed Property of Bengal,&c. In Two Parts. With an Appendix, Including a Discussion of the Great National Question; Whether, by the Grant and Condition of Such Tenures, the Zemindar, Or the Sovereign-Representative-Government, is to be Considered the Legal Real Proprietor of the Soil, as Landlord,--according to the Laws and Constitution of the Mogul Empire in India, which are Referred To, as Proper to Ascertain the Rule of Right, in an Act of the British Legislature, Passed in the Year 1784

James Grant

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