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Here, at your fingertips, are more than 35 years’ worth of issues and articles. Search by date, company or keyword.
Reasonable Nutjob Caucus
To the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a certain French legislature was a "box of matches." We judge that a Trump fiscal appointment meaningfully boosts the chances of political conflagration in the new administration.
Wrong number
A certain vendor of an indispensable 21st century communications service loses money, piles on leverage and underinvests in its capital stock. Still, its bond prices rally and its share price levitates. Yield-grubbing in a bull market.
Can make it anywhere
"Sell New York," we said, and someone did. That someone is hereby stricken from the list of Grant's short-sale candidates.
Out of the kitchen
Beleaguered by eight years of weaponized regulation, the dining-out industry sees a new day dawning. What am I to bid for a like-new, high-end commercial stainless steel 2-bay steam table with drain and storage shelf?
China being China
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Market complicates the cadres' attempts to control the money market. Looking ahead to an eventful Chinese New Year.
Central bank of many time zones
"America First" is Donald Trump's moto, but it could just as easily be Janet Yellen's. How foreign events will color American monetary policy in ways that the Fed chair, the president-elect and even Mr. Market may not yet anticipate.
Discombobulation trade
Tax-rate uncertainty and the November spike in interest rates have combined to turn the municipal-bond market upside-down. From tumult comes opportunity.
Past Performance, Inc.
Good news you shout from the rooftops, bad news you mumble in a footnote. The most successful Canadian company you've never heard of isn't one for shouting.
The short of it
Sixty-three short-sale candidates have featured in the pages of Grant's over the past three years. We write to render an accounting.
Don't say they didn't warn you
From Italy's revitalized 5-Star Movement, a modest proposal for a "parallel" currency. Now, wither the euro?
It’s G. William Miller time
Spring training for the Trump administration feels like exhibition baseball under the Florida sun. Pending the start of real competition, optimism is irrefutable. Anything seems possible. A speculation on the next four years in monetary policy.
Redheaded stepchild REIT
Put aside the adage, “Buy the best building on the worst block.” We here propose the purchase of OK buildings on a terrible block. Anyway, who needs analyst coverage, an annual report, a dividend or a 10-Q?
Contain your enthusiasm
Years of ultra-low interest rates have facilitated the cartelization of a certain branch of American industry. Rarely have its profits been so high. And rarely has it been so overvalued. An eagle eye on the soaring dollar.
Move over, mandarins
Herewith the text of your editor’s speech to the 34th Annual Cato Monetary Conference in Washington, D.C., complete with a few things that he thought of later.
Tinker to Evers to Chance – to us
The 20th-century Chicago Cubs required fewer than 90 minutes to put away the Detroit Tigers in the fifth and final game of the 1908 World Series. A funny thing is human progress, in money no less than in baseball.
Opportunity droops
The leader in one of the world’s most battered industries prepares to lead a consolidation drive. Buying low is laudable. Buying very low is scary.
Muni fun facts
Seven years into an economic expansion, the credit quality of the U.S. states is getting worse, not better. Who’s worried? Not the yield-starved Japanese bond buyer.
Banking on Turmoil
Imagine a capitalist island set down in a communist sea. Recall the American real-estate bubble of the mid-2000s. Observe the mighty Swiss franc. Thus imagining, recalling and observing, you understand the vulnerability of a certain top-tier bank.
Driving while leveraged
People aren’t waiting for Janet Yellen to lift the Federal funds rate on Dec. 14. They’ve been lifting various yields for months. Day of reckoning for auto credit?
The arc of the narrative
There’s always a narrative. Better to get in on the ground floor of the great stories that, at first blush, seem preposterous.
No yield for you
If you are looking for someone to thank, Mr. or Ms. Yield-Starved Cash Hoarder, you may thank the U.S. government. Are there, then, no money-like income oases?
Kicking the can
Hundreds of companies used to compete to sell canning jars to American families. For the giant corporate descendants of those glass-jar makers, it’s not so clear that the 21st-century business model is any more lucrative than the legacy one.
Disabled no more
Vanishingly rare is the profitable, market-leading, stockholder-attuned, reasonably large, reasonably cheap business that would stand to gain by a rise in interest rates. This party to the mysteries of actuarial science and insurance accounting would seem to tick every box.
Keep selling it
What we did not anticipate was the warmth of the credit market’s hospitality towards a known Grant’s pick not to click.
Counting up the pretexts
There’s not much doubt that the Fed will raise rates on Dec. 14. The greater question is what it will do the next time it has to cut.
'You get what you pay for'
Federally-mandated overhaul of the retirement-themed investment business promises a big boost to passive investing, which was doing fine without the government's imprimatur. Robotic disruption plus federal coercion makes a force to be reckoned with.
On the ETF divide
A golden age of active investment management awaits only one signal, disastrous event. Is there an exchange-traded fund for which ExxonMobil is not ideally suited?
Battle of the bonds
In the great debate over interest rates at the fall 2016 Grant's conference, the scholarly bull and the newly fledged bear butted heads over more than the future of bond yields.
**Ed. note:
John H. Cochrane's, essay, “Inflation and Debt”, as mentioned in the issue. Click here to view.
They said it
What to do with money? A grand survey of the wit and wisdom dispensed by the Grant's speakers at The Pierre Hotel last week. "Almost everything that is particularly attractive is a little bit unusual."
Dysfunctional CDO
Deutsche's bond sale registered an increased cost of borrowing for the big sick puppy. Unclear is whether investors are taking a dimmer view of Deutsche or a closer look at its fine print.
Case of the strange coincidence
A 35-year bond bear market ended 35 years ago. Since when was history so symmetrical?
House of fads
Activist monetary policy has laid low active investment management. Index funds and ETFs have supplanted the fine art of security analysis. A bearish speculation on the central banks’ own Wall Street doppelganger.
Wealth effect redo
Raise up asset prices, the central bankers proposed. The rich, becoming richer, would spend. It was an elegant theory.
One-stock ETF
What single liquid security is the best proxy for China’s frenzied finance? A certain deal-doing conglomerate may fill the bill.
Clio for the Fed
The editor of Grant’s prepared a few remarks to deliver on Sept. 28 on the occasion of his presentation with the Money Marketeers’ Distinguished Achievement Award.
Not banking on Europe
Spotty profitability, sclerotic technology, an immense book of derivatives and scary leverage: The ripples are spreading far and wide.
Into the new abnormal
Abnormal presidential candidates, abnormal interest rates and abnormal monetary thinking are calculated to deliver abnormal results. "I hear the choppers hovering. They're hovering overhead."
Musk, Edison, Tesla
If you ever wondered where Elon Musk came from--what peculiar alignment of stars produced this protean creator, spender, borrower, innovator, printer of red ink, spinner of yarns and blower of deadlines--only look to the great Thomas Alva Edison, or, perhaps, to Edison's brilliant enemy and Musk's corporate namesake, Nikola Tesla.
From hunger
Low-vol is a cult for this age of low growth and zero-percent money-market interest rates. A bearish appraisal of one of the beneficiaries of a love affair with boredom.
Worst is yet to come
The story remains the same for a Grant's candidate for the title of most likely not to succeed. Picking apart the one-offs and monitoring the credit troubles of a bank-in-all-but-name.
Why bankers fret
Some borrowers stretch to meet looming interest payments. Can interest rates ever be low enough?
2016 Summer Vacation Issue
This summertime e-anthology of Grant’s articles, both old and new, is for you. Please pass it along, with our compliments, to any and all prospective members of the greater Grant’s family.
Trudges, the nation’s business
"Speculate" is the operative word. Economic cycles, interest rates and the dollar are the topics at hand. A skeptical eye on the world's "most crowded trade."
Sell Donald Trump
Crash or no crash, the personal stock of Donald J. Trump, the New York real-estate celebrity, was up. Up is Trump's favorite direction....
Driving the automo-bezzle
The automakers are selling more and more cars, or so they say. An inquiry into the meaning of the word "sell."
Paper tigers
A new high in the prestige of modern central banks was recorded two Fridays ago when Britain waylaid the gold market. Without warning, Her Majesty’s government announced the sale of more than half of the U.K. gold reserve, formerly called “treasure.”
Sell Big Food
Americans may be buying the stocks. They are not – as they have done in the past – buying the products. The trouble is that crowds are
Monetary regime change
On August 30, at the annual monetary jamboree of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Alan Greenspan washed his hands of responsibility for the bubble he said he could not have pricked even if he had noticed it floating above his desk on a string.
Send no money
Inventive minds resist the urge to capitulate at the alpine peaks and stygian depths of speculative markets. Rather, they adapt, sometimes with a twinkle in their eye. A no-risk, index-beating scheme for this sub-zero time.
Hostile banking
No staycation for Mr. Market this year. Adventure in foreign parts is rather to his taste. Kind words for a pair of pariahs.
Dorian gray
A former Grant’s pick to click was always a speculation. It is now a very cheap and very risky speculation.
At the intersection of cars and banks
E-Z money was the spark plug of the post-crisis auto recovery. Beware, now, a creeping tightness.
Ultimate hedge
The tribulations of the active spirits, especially hedge funds, is the subject at hand – that and a revisit to a 21st century monetary hedge.
Corporate mystery meat
The strategy of selling complex solutions rather than individual products is the new, new thing in flavors and ingredients. Safety, or rather, perceived safety, is what investors seem to crave.
Speculating for income
For U.S. dollar-denominated yields in excess of 3%, one must settle for the types of securities once known as a businessman’s risk.
They asked for it
Short-term interest rates didn’t wait for the Federal Open Market Committee. Back to you, federal overseers.
Remember the Shell Union Oil 2 1/2s of 1971
Long-trending cycles are the standard in bonds. The once-in-5,000-year interest-rate event is non-cyclical and nonstandard. Today’s negative bond yields are that non-cyclical singularity.
European scavenger hunt
Under the spell of Mario Draghi, the once rugged terrain of European credit is today a flat, bleak tableland. Preserving capital, sanity
Borrow to rent
The cacophony of jackhammers, brick saws and excavators outside our window (and yours, too, we’ll bet) bodes well for the construction capital-goods business. A certain company’s debt bodes ill.
Orchids from Ecuador
Provoking the market gods by attempting to bring the outdoors inside. Kale Caesar salads for the pampered staff.
Subject to revision
In today’s climate of radical monetary policy, what’s worse, imperfect data or imperfect advice? The Japanese try both.
Monetary rule by the cargo cult
What with Brexit, the soft May durable goods report, collapsing bank stocks, the surging dollar exchange rate, the looming American presidential election, etc., the question is not so much when the Fed will raise its little funds rate as when it may cut it. Now unfolding is a speculation on the developing crisis in the Ph.D. standard of discretionary monetary management.
A selective panic
There was never a discriminating panic, but the post-Brexit markets outdid themselves. Are the algos quite sure about buying the sub-1%-yielding 10-year notes of the country with the bulging current-account deficit?
Inside Story
Strange to relate, the collapse of the share prices of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International and Endo International has drawn no line under the era of debt-funded
Thanks, Dodd-Frank
You don’t need a financial crisis to jack up repurchase rates nowadays. Congress has seen to that job all by itself. In the record books: The highest overnight general treasury repo rate since October 2008.
Renminbi on the march
As Britain leaves the European Union, Chinese investors are fleeing the renminbi. The curious case of resurgent growth in Chinese M1.
Kitten up a tree
Sky-high asset prices make an odd accompaniment to softening business activity. Now what, First Chief Yellen?
Waiter, the check
People have to eat, and investors want to invest. The trouble, in 2016, is that the urge to eat and the propensity to invest have fallen out of phase.
We are Metro
Washington’s subway system has been 50 years in the unmaking. Problems do not become less problematic simply on account of their being familiar, the editor of Grant’s reminded the Washington, D.C. Chartered Financial Analysts.
Foreign and domestic
America is a massive net debtor to the world. Then, again – a mitigating fact – Americans are good investors.
REIT from hell
A good management is no match for a bad business, goes the adage. Belatedly, we take those wise words to heart.
Popular Pariahs
Never mind "global macro." Global micro's the ticket. Pick a good company in a bad country with a worse government.
Lending clubbed
"Saving up" for a purchase is a phrase that connotes consumer behavior in the pioneer days of Little House on the Prairie. In impatient millennial America, we borrow to buy.
Get out of town
How to square the decline in the assets of the People's Bank of China with the evident boom times in China's commercial banking sector? Read on.
For monetary diversity
Diversity, especially in the matter of ideas, is at the top of the Grant's election-year monetary reform agenda.
Transmission mechanism
A cyclical stock that dances to the beat of a cyclical industry (as well as to the cha-cha-cha of the Federal Open Market Committee). Now unfolding is a speculation about a profit-driven investment decline.
Just type 'CNRR001'
That the world's second-largest economy is an accident waiting to happen is a longstanding tenet of these pages. What's new is the mounting evidence that the accidental occurrence is drawing closer.
We hardly knew ye
On Friday the 13th of May, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. announced its intention to redeem the three issues of preferred stock that featured in the April 8 issue of Grant's.
One and done
A fall in profits and activity comes despite an explosion in bank lending to businesses – time to reconsider that rate hike, Chair Yellen?
Paging George Champion
Before desk-top computers—before consultants—a worldwise banker laid in reserves against loan losses in the certain knowledge that credit experience is cyclical. What the great man could teach the Financial Accounting Standards Board.
Made (up) in Japan
You can run from credit risk, but you can’t hide it. A kind word for bankruptcy reform, no matter how belated.
Bubble No. 3
Growth in household net worth had handily outstripped growth in after-tax income. You may thank the Fed, Donald Trump.
Under the headline
The share price would be lower if the analysts were more curious. Attention, Wall Street: There’s a balance sheet, too.
Buncombe glut
Did the president of the European Central Bank say “savings” when – with a little more attention to analytical detail – he should have said “credit”?
The road to confetti
April 15 comes and goes but the federal debt stays and grows. The secrets of its life force are the topics at hand – that and how the upsurge in financial leverage, both public and private, may bear on the value of the dollar and on the course of monetary affairs.
No, not Treasurys
"Normalization is a good thing. Rates going up is a good thing. It's not a bad thing because we have a strong economy." The speaker is the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., and the setting is the spring 2016 Grant's conference.
Credit the yield
Now under way is a reprise and a report: a reprise of a couple of familiar yield-bearing Grant's favorites and a report on the state of small-business credit.
For the repressed
For the people at the receiving end of zero percent interest rates and quantitative easing, "inflation is not that dead."
Insider to outsider
"There are probably more dangerous words in the English language than 'data dependence,' but I don't think any said with this frequency…."
Advice at a price
If it's financial advice you want, you could ask a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Alternatively, you could invest in a company that markets highbrow robo-advice.
Solvency not liquidity
"Budgets have been out of whack and unbalanced for 10 years straight and they have been balanced with borrowing." A game of debtor-creditor drama "is unfortunately coming to an end."
Bullish on Oil
Standing before the Grant's crowd, a bear on oil before the deluge, declares that the bottom is in.
Not enough gold
With progress in mining technology at a standstill, "the problem that the industry faces is really daunting when you look at the demand curve."
Short and a long
It was the short that caught the Grant's audience's fancy. "It is a poor steward of capital and a poor investor of capital. Its operating metrics are implausible and not a few of its assets dubious."
Next for Japan
"In the face of all-time high profits, there is record-high cash-hoarding. One must infer that Japanese corporations don't trust the future, or at least not the Japanese future."
South of the border
The stars are profitably aligned for U.S. investors in Latin America. "Local currencies are cheap, multiples are reasonable and corporate earnings have troughed."
For a monetary encore
Expectations run high for this pioneer in radical policy to do more – but what more can it do?
Driving the automo-bezzle
The automakers are selling more and more cars, or so they say. An inquiry into the meaning of the word "sell."
Dialing for dollars
At the end of a lease, what's left? Less than a certain capital-goods giant might be bargaining for.
Wide open spaces
A known Grant's pick not to click is living out the theory of interest rate-induced market distortions. Landlords, beware.
Coulda' seen it coming
Financial calamities are obvious – in hindsight. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, please copy.
Inflation cheering section
The very people you’d suppose would oppose the monetary equivalent of breaking and entering are the ones who are cheering it on.
Sell Big Food
Americans may be buying the stocks. They are not – as they have done in the past – buying the products. The trouble is that crowds are
Taps for credit
While Draghi’s latest trick may be notched up as another resounding success, one wonders if Mario should be quite so eager to please the markets.
Investment value—“on”
Occupying a kind of parallel, Benjamin Graham universe, this bright light has figured out a way to buy assets during a bear market rather than having to sell them. A bullish reappraisal.
Business is hard
Our old flame became a bankrupt. Its road into Chapter 11 and its prospective road out again are the topics under discussion. Financial leverage, economic cycles, commodity prices, human foible and bad luck are the featured sub-topics.
A debt bell tinkles
A certain deep-subprime auto-loan securitization has run into trouble just four months after it came into the world. Casting about for someone or something to blame, we blame “liquidity.”
Borrow to plow
What looks like a tax-and commodity-price-induced bubble in tractors, combines, harvesters etc. is visibly deflating – visibly, so far, except to the stock market. The latest from Machinery Pete.
Chinese exceptionalism
On the topic of shareholder rights, America is an exceptional country. So is China.
For the un-meek
If something can’t go on forever, it won’t. Now under way is a bullish speculation on a bearish set of circumstances. Anticipating the joyous relief imparted by the lifting of bankruptcy fears.
Not quite parity
Risk parity was the subject of a great debate that was scheduled to be held the day after Grant’s went to press. Herewith the text of your editor’s opening remarks.
19 yuge basis points
It used to be said that 5% would pull money from the moon. One small fraction of 1% is pulling billions from banks. Monetary conditions have tightened, but not in the old familiar way.
Gyro Gearloose redux .
The arc of monetary evolution is the subject at hand. A question for the dollar-holding subscribers of Grant’s: What’s really in your wallet?
Buildings are tortoises
Real estate will not be hurried. Contracted rents, like skyscrapers, tend to stay put. Now in progress is an analysis of the relationship among stationary buildings, mobile financial markets and reluctant lenders.
The Brexit contagion
Betting on the contagious nature of an event that hasn’t happened is what might be called a time-waster. Not so in the case of Britain’s mooted exit from the European Union.
Power of negativity
If bad debt can destroy a good currency, only imagine what bad debt can do to a bad currency. China and its wobbly renminbi are the subjects at hand.
Call in the safes
Does America need another monetary pick-me-up? The question is debatable. Still, the Fed is quietly dusting off its QE toolbox.
Next from the monetary kitchen
Negative nominal interest rates, helicopter money and the "cashless society" – like a play on tryout in New Haven, the ideas of the next phase of radical monetary control are getting a public airing before their Broadway debut.
Big sick puppy
Fears of Deutsche Bank AG's missing an interest payment on a contingent convertible security sent the bank's common-stock price skidding. Are Deutsche's problems idiosyncratic or systemic?
Canadian sunrise
For many a disappointed Canadian retail investor, "preferred" is more a term of derision than of description. We write to suggest that their loss is the contrarian's gain.
New default cycle
Fear, always a value accelerant, is back in the air and on the palms. Putting the "high" back into high yield.
Toward zero or less
Mortgage real-estate investment trusts are the topic, interest rates are the sub-topic and income – precious income – is the point of it all.
Outflows to themselves
China's cadres command that the People's Republic will grow by 6.5% in 2016. Say it were true. How much financing would that require and where would the money come from?
Mr. Market, the merciless
There is no such thing as a separate and distinct “U.S. economy.” There is rather the single dollarized and financialized and over-leveraged worldwide economy. Like it or not, we are all in this together—the Chinese communists, the European socialists, the Japanese statists and we the people.
Left hanging
The final sentence of the final article in the previous issue of Grant’s stopped just short of the period. Here it is, from beginning to end: “Let us not forget that Cowperthwaite was the architect of prosperity.”
Hope over evidence
In a bear market, two and two make three, at the most. To judge by the fancy, hope-inflated multiple of a certain U.S.-based multinational, this must be a bull market, still.
Hey, Canada, seriously?
Vancouver is taking radical – though, to American eyes, hardly unprecedented – steps to perk up flagging condominium sales. Check back next year for data on virtual defaults.
Trouble times leverage
Cause and effect, leverage and volatility, babies and bath water are the topics under discussion; junk bonds and leveraged loans (and the structures that house them) are the featured asset classes.
What’s in a name?
As a purveyor of e-cigarettes, Vapor Corp. has achieved the epiphany of joining share price with corporate name.
Virtual-reality interest rates
As Grant’s goes to press, the scholars of the FOMC were deep in cogitation. Some expect Chair Yellen to emulate Mario Draghi and implement negative interest rates. Would it be so implausible?
Jobs 1 and 2 for the new year
Top two items for the 2016 agenda: Free Lee Bo, the abducted Hong Kong bookseller! Unleash the constructive forces of arbitrage!
Black as coal
Nothing is better calculated to restore the profitability of a fallen industry than to cut off its access to credit. A bullish word for a desperately out-of-favor business.
2020 foresight
To judge by the long-range projections contained in the Jan. 11 press release disclosing the merger of Shire plc and Baxalta, Inc., the document was drafted by clairvoyants.
Neither fish nor fowl
A certain kind of hybrid security answers the needs of leveraged issuers and yield-starved investors alike. It offers incremental returns relative to senior bonds in the same capital structure. There must be something wrong with it.
That 1980s show
Falling grain prices, a rising dollar exchange rate, the softening market in farmland – anyone feel nostalgic yet? Paging Bob Dylan.
Hong Kong Speech
On Jan. 8, the editor of Grant’s addressed the BofAML Chief Investment Officers Conference in Hong Kong. A salute to the former British colony’s late financial secretary.
Hear Messrs. Train and Junk Bond
Dr. Copper has spoken. Heed, now, the macroeconomic soundings in rail traffic and corporate debt. Your move, Chair Yellen.