Edward Chancellor

'[A] fine and essential work' Wall Street Journal'Insightful and droll' Financial TimesWhen Jeremy Grantham entered the investment business in the 1960s, he brought the thrifty Yorkshire values he had been raised with. While other money managers focused on blue chip stocks, he studied stock market history and constructed the first indices for small-cap and value stocks. Charting their ebb and flow, he saw the powerful force that would become central to his investment philosophy: mean reversion, 'the heartbreaking principle that good times always revert back to more boring, more ordinary times.'In the early 1970s Grantham launched one of the first S&P 500 index strategies. Soon after, he cofounded GMO, which became the first firm to use a computer for investment analysis. In the late 1990s he acquired notoriety as a 'permabear' for refusing to buy into dotcom mania. Clients left in droves, but he was vindicated when the bubble burst in 2000. Yet while his wealth grew, so did his alarm at the disastrous consequences of short-term thinking for both investors and for the planet, and he has directed nearly all his wealth to environmental protection. Written with the bestselling financial historian Edward Chancellor, The Making of a Permabear is replete with investment insights and provides a candid insider's tour of the booms and busts of the past half century.

The first book of the next crisis. A history of interest rates by a leading financial commentator, updated with a new postscript. *Winner of the 2023 Hayek Book Prize* *Longlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award* All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest coordinates these activities. The story of capitalism is thus the story of interest: the price that individuals, companies and nations pay to borrow money. In The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor traces the history of interest from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia, through debates about usury in Restoration Britain and John Law ' s ill-fated Mississippi scheme, to the global credit booms of the twenty-first century. We generally assume that high interest rates are harmful, but Chancellor argues that, whenever money is too easy, financial markets become unstable. He takes the story to the present day, when interest rates have sunk lower than at any time in the five millennia since they were first recorded - including the extraordinary appearance of negative rates in Europe and Japan - and highlights how this has contributed to profound economic insecurity and financial fragility. Chancellor reveals how extremely low interest rates not only create asset price inflation but are also largely responsible for weak economic growth, rising inequality, zombie companies, elevated debt levels and the pensions crises that have afflicted the West in recent years - conditions under which economies cannot possibly thrive. At the same time, easy money in China has inflated an epic real estate bubble, accompanied by the greatest credit and investment boom in history. As the global financial system edges closer to yet another crisis, Chancellor shows that only by understanding interest can we hope to face the challenges ahead.