Jonathan Gray, 59, Finance Analyst
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Jonathan Gray, who died Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital, was a longtime mortgage and finance analyst for the investment firm of AllianceBernstein L.P. He was 59. A well-respected and often-quoted figure in the industry, he was elected to the Institutional Investor All-Star team for 29 of the last 30 years, missing only 2003 because of an illness.
A native of Kingston, Pa., where his parents ran a department store, Gray attended Wesleyan University as an undergraduate and received an master’s degree in business administration from New York University. In 1973, he joined Sanford C. Bernstein and Co. as a securities analyst following the savings and loan industry. He stayed with the firm, which later became AllianceBernstein, his entire career, and later expanded his coverage to include government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and the mortgage industry.
“He was one of the core group of people that established Bernstein as the premier research firm on Wall Street,” a former research associate with Alliance-Bernstein, who interviewed Gray for his first job in 1973, David Levine, said.
“He would have been flourishing right now with all the turmoil” in mortgage markets, AllianceBernstein’s chairman and CEO, Lewis Sanders, said.
Gray was author of a 1988 white paper for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., “Financial Deregulation and the Savings and Loan Crisis,” and was frequently called to testify before Congress on pending finance regulation.
In 2002 Gray was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and given 18 months to live. Applying his research savvy to his ailment, he corresponded with leading oncologists and researchers to develop a customized therapeutic regimen that helped keep him alive for nearly six years, his family said. He also wrote extensively in support of a proposed national war on cancer. He expected his fight to become more salient as the baby boom generation moved into retirement years.
For many years, he kept a copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” in his pocket, his son, Zachary, said, with hopes of one day memorizing it perfectly.
Jonathan Gray
Born March 3, 1948, in Kingston, Pa.; died October 29 of esophageal cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan; survived by his wife, Bonnie, and his sons, Jordan and Zachary.
