James Stone

James M. Stone (born November 12, 1947) is an American business executive. Jim Stone is the founder of Boston-based Plymouth Rock Assurance Corporation and chief executive of its parent company, The Plymouth Rock Company. Stone was a Lecturer in Economics at Harvard University in the early 1970s and then was the Massachusetts Commissioner of Insurance from 1975 to 1979. He was appointed chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by President Jimmy Carter, and served on the Commission until 1983. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Early life and education 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. 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. 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. 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. Career 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. In 1975, Stone was appointed Insurance Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by Governor Michael S. Dukakis. In 1979, Stone was appointed chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by President Jimmy Carter. 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. In 1982, he founded Plymouth Rock Assurance Corporation.