James Stone (executive)

James M. (Jim) Stone was born in New York City in 1947. His father was an attorney and a poet, and his mother, Babette Rosmond, was an author and also the fiction editor of Seventeen magazine.[5] His younger brother is the writer Gene Stone. Stone was educated in the public schools of Pelham, New York, and at Harvard University. In 1969, Stone received his bachelor's degree, graduating with Highest Honors in Economics, and was elected a member to Phi Beta Kappa.[6] His academic work was recognized with the Young Prize for the best undergraduate economics thesis, as well as the Goldsmith Prize for best research paper presented to the Graduate School in Economics.[1] Stone later received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1973. He was appointed as a lecturer in economics by the Harvard faculty to teach courses on the economics of securities markets.[7]

While teaching at Harvard, Stone consulted in the insurance industry on a part-time basis. During this period, he completed six examinations for admission to the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), and his 1973 paper on the insurance of catastrophic risk became a standard requirement of the CAS syllabus.[8][9]

In 1975, Stone was appointed Insurance Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts[10][11] by Governor Michael S. Dukakis. In 1979, Stone was appointed chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by President Jimmy Carter.[12][13] Stone’s CFTC tenure was controversial due to his calls for tight position limits, enhanced disclosure, and high margin requirements on derivatives. The trading profession and his fellow Commissioners dismissed his assertions that the burgeoning scale of speculative derivatives could prove destabilizing for the economy as a whole. In 1983, Stone finished his term in Washington at the CFTC and returned to Boston.[3] In 1982, he founded Plymouth Rock Assurance Corporation. He has been the group's CEO since its establishment.[14][15]

The Plymouth Rock Assurance Group of Companies operates a number of personal lines insurers, specializing in automobile and homeowners coverage in the Northeast United States.[15][16] It manages approximately $1.7 billion in annual premiums.[16]

Stone served on the Board of Directors of The Boston Globe Newspaper Corporation from 1998 to 2006,[15][17] and for five years as vice chairman of GlobalPost,[18] a web-based international news service.

Stone is the author of "One Way for Wall Street," a 1979 book on the securities industry,[3] and "Five Easy Theses: Commonsense Solutions to America's Greatest Economic Challenges" (May 2016), a Bloomberg Best Books of 2016 selection.[19] He has also authored articles on insurance, finance, and economics.[20][21][22]

Front Cover of James M. Stone's "Five Easy Theses"

Stone served for ten years on the Board (and is now Chairman Emeritus) of Management Sciences for Health,[23] a large international humanitarian health infrastructure provider. He currently chairs the Academic Affairs and Commercial Relations Committees of the Board of Directors of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a preeminent genetics and cancer research institute.[24] He is the chairman of the School on the Move prize panel, which grants a substantial monetary award each year to the most improved Boston public school.[25] He is a member of the Trust and the Nominating Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[26] He is also a member of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Finance Committee of ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize winning non-profit investigative reporting organization.[27]

Stone is the principal donor to eight academic programs for the study of wealth and income inequality. These are located at Harvard University;[28] the Harris School of Public Policy at The University of Chicago;[29] City University of New York Graduate Center;[30] Brown University;[31] University of California, Berkeley;[32] University of Michigan; [33] He and his wife have also established The Stone Living Laboratory, which is based at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and engaged in the study of coastal sustainability in the era of climate change. [34] The Stones created and sponsor, the Stone Museum of African-American History Book Prize, [35] which awards with a significant stipend each year the best scholarly book on African American history as chosen by a distinguished panel of academic jurors.

Stone is married to Cathleen Douglas Stone, a lawyer and environmentalist and the widow of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. They have twin children, Curtis and Lauren Stone, born in 1995. They live in Boston.[36]

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