James Chanos

Jim Chanos is the founder and managing partner of Kynikos Associates. As the largest exclusive short selling investment firm, Kynikos provides investment management services for domestic and offshore clients. Mr. Chanos opened Kynikos Associates in 1985 to implement investment 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, Mr. 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." More recently, the media has noted Mr. Chanos’s prescience in alerting finance ministers and others about the global financial crisis well before it occurred. His views on the lessons from the crisis, capital markets regulation, and investment strategies, among other topics, are regularly covered by news organizations worldwide.

Mr. Chanos is chairman of the Coalition of Private Investment Companies, whose members are diverse in size and the investment strategies they pursue. The members’ clients include pension funds, asset managers, foundations, other institutional investors, and qualified wealthy individuals. In that role, Mr. 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 United Kingdom.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Mr. Chanos lives in New York City with his four children. He is the 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. Mr. Chanos received his BA in economics and political science in 1980 from Yale University.