Fire the Braniacs!
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Date: 10-25-2007
Start Time:
5:30pm
End Time: 7:00pm
Speaker: James Grant, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer
Location: Park Avenue Plaza at 55 East 52nd Street
ABTSRACT
"To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ," Warren Buffett wrote in his preface to the fourth edition of Benjamin Graham's "Intelligent Investor." But you wouldn't know it from 21st century Wall Street. Ratings agencies appraise, financial guarantors insure and investors purchase debt structures that no one can wholly understand. The most gothic of the mortgage-backed instruments—so-called collateralized debt obligations of collateralized debt obligations, or CDO-squareds—reference many millions of separate loans. What is the point of diminishing returns on financial invention? Alas, we have passed it.
BIO
James Grant founded Grant’s Interest Rate Observer in 1983. He is the author of five books on finance and history: Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend (Simon & Schuster, 1983), Money of the Mind (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), Minding Mr. Market (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993) and The Trouble with Prosperity (Times Books, 1996). John Adams: Party of One, a biography of the second president of the United States was published in March 2005 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Mr. Grant’s television appearances include “60 Minutes,” “The News Hour with JimLehrer,” “CBS Evening News,” and a ten year stint on Wall Street Week. His journalism has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including the Financial Times, the Harvard Business Review, the New Republic, the American Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is, in addition, a founding general partner of Nippon Partners, a hedge fund that invests in Japan.Mr. Grant, a former Navy gunner's mate, is a Phi Beta Kappa alumnus of Indiana University. He earned a master's degree in international relations from Columbia University and began his career in journalism in 1972, at the Baltimore Sun. He joined the staff of Barron's in 1975 where he originated the Current Yield column.
*There will be a cocktail following the event.
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