Jack Carter, eldest son of President Jimmy Carter, has taken a long route to entering the family business: one that went through the financial futures trading pits of Chicago, several interbank trading rooms and an offshore hedge fund center.
After all that, Carter settled in Nevada where he is the running for the Senate against incumbent Republican John Ensign. Carter won the Democratic primary on Aug. 15.
Carter earned a physics degree from Georgia Tech after returning home to Georgia after a stint in the Navy. He entered the University of Georgia School of Law in 1972. In 1975 he was accepted into the Georgia bar and worked on his dad’s campaign for president. Carter practiced law for a short period but did not enjoy it so he started a grain elevator business in Calhoun, Ga. “I was running grain elevators in the late 1970s and figured out how to hedge interest rates. That brought me to Chicago,” Carter says. ADM hired Carter to run their bond desk. In 1981 Carter left ADM for Continental Bank and ran their bond desk. In the mid 1980s he decided to trade for himself and joined three pit locals who bankrolled his trading.
Carter developed a technical trading system using point and figure charts. He made a good living up until 1988 when market volatility slumped. “In 1981 the range in the bonds averaged a full point, in 1988 it averaged six ticks.”
He left the floor after that and took a position with Citibank’s foreign exchange broker dealer. Carter was mainly handling institutional customer business but also maintained a small proprietary trading account for the bank.
In 1992 he met his wife Elizabeth, who also worked in banking. They moved to Bermuda and he went to work for global investment firms Invesco and Bank of Bermuda. There he designed foreign exchange overlays for institutional customers.
With a great rolodex of institutional customers in a hotbed of hedge fund activity, Carter launched Carter Global, a third-party marketer for hedge funds, in which Carter performed due diligence on individual funds for his institutional customers.
“I made sure they lost money when they were supposed to lose money and made money when they were supposed to make money,” Carter says.
Carter decided to enter politics after growing frustrated with the Bush administration. Carter says the administration is overly secretive and does not seek input from Congress. “It is the arrogance that I don’t like. They have lost all principles of conservative government. They have politicized every single government agency by putting people in that are more concerned about what it looks like for the party than to [provide services] that need to be provided.”
He says lessons he learned as a trader will serve him well in government.
“The one thing that I have learned as a trader is that I am not right nearly as often as I think. If we had more people like that in government, we would be a lot better off. And right now we have people who think they are more right than anybody else has ever been. That is the arrogance. If you haven’t learned yet that you can make mistakes, then you ought not be in
government,” he says, adding, “As far as I can tell, this administration by their own mind has not made a single mistake yet. From a trading stand point you have to assume that you are going to be wrong and you got to plan for that eventuality.”
Carter has often kept a low profile. In fact, an opponent commented that he was unaware that President Carter had a son. If he wins this race, Carter says his years as a trader and in finance will be helpful. “From an industry perspective, it is safe to say that I would be a friend of the hedge fund industry. Not so much that I will guarantee to be on the hedge fund industry’s side of everything, but because I understand it.”
