Jim Chanos is the founder and managing partner of Kynikos Associates, a short-selling investment firm that provides investment management services for domestic and offshore clients. He launched Kynikos in 1985 to implement strategies he had uncovered while beginning his Wall Street career as a financial analyst with Paine Webber, Gilford Securities and Deutsche Bank.
Throughout his investment career, Chanos has identified and sold short the shares of numerous well-known corporate financial disasters; among them Baldwin-United, Commodore International, Coleco, Integrated Resources, Boston Chicken, Sunbeam, Conseco and Tyco International. His celebrated short sale of Enron shares was dubbed by Barron's as "the market call of the decade, if not the past fifty years." The media have noted his prescience in alerting finance ministers and others about the global financial crisis well before it occurred. His views on the lessons of the crisis, capital markets regulation and investment strategies, among other topics, are regularly covered by news organizations worldwide.
Chanos is chairman of the Coalition of Private Investment Companies, whose members are diverse in their size investment strategies. The members' clients include pension funds, asset managers, foundations, other institutional investors and qualified wealthy individuals. In that role, Chanos has testified before Congress and provided comments to regulations proposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Services Authority in the U.K.
He is currently a lecturer in finance at the Yale University School of Management and teaches a class on the history of financial fraud.
Chanos lives in New York City and has four children. He is president of the board of trustees of The Browning School and serves as a trustee at The Nightingale-Bamford School and The New York Historical Society. Chanos received his BA in economics and political science in 1980 from Yale University.
