Jim Chanos

Jim Chanos is the founder and managing partner of Kynikos Associates, the world's largest exclusive short-selling investment firm. Kynikos provides investment management services for domestic and offshore clients through investment funds, partnerships, corporations and managed accounts, maintaining private portfolios of securities. The Ursus, Kriticos and Kynikos Opportunity funds seek to profit from the unusually high alphas found on the long and short side of the U.S. and non-U.S. equity markets.

Chanos started Kynikos Associates in 1985 to implement strategies he had uncovered during his time as a financial analyst with Paine Webber, Gilford Securities and Deutsche Bank. Throughout his investment career, Chanos has identified trouble with and sold short the shares of many corporations, including Baldwin-United, Commodore International, Coleco, Integrated Resources, Boston Chicken, Sunbeam, Conseco and Tyco International. Barron's called his celebrated short sale of Enron shares "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 crisis, capital markets regulation and investment strategies, among other topics, are regularly covered by media worldwide.

Chanos is chairman of the Coalition of Private Investment Companies, whose members are diverse and whose clients include pension funds, asset managers, foundations, other institutional investors and qualified individuals. In that role, Chanos has testified before Congress and provided comments to regulations proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Britain's Financial Services Authority. (Learn more at www.hedgefundfacts.org and www.financialdetectives.org.)

A visiting lecturer in finance at the Yale University School of Management, Chanos teaches a class on the history of financial fraud.

Chanos was born and raised in Milwaukee and lives in New York City. He is president of the board of trustees of The Browning School, and he serves as a trustee at The Nightingale-Bamford School and The New-York Historical Society. Chanos received his B.A. in economics and political science in 1980 from Yale University.