Words matter. These are the best Jeremy Grantham Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If you’re afraid of inflation, I think – and if you can bring yourself to have a long horizon – and when I say long, I mean ten to 20 years, not the usual ten to 20 weeks – that locking up resources in the ground is a terrific idea.
Market timing, by the way, is a tag some buy-and-hold investors use to put down anything that involves using your brain. These are the same people who like to watch the locomotive coming and get run down in the name of discipline.
When it comes to portfolios, my personal advice is for anyone who can, put money into forestry or farmland. Long term, you would probably never come near their returns in the stock market. In the world that I see, land is golden.
Libertarians believe that any government interference is bad. Anyone with a brain knows that climate change needs governmental leadership, and they can smell this is bad news for their philosophy. Their ideology is so strongly held that, remarkably, it’s overcoming the facts.
One day we will have more inflation, and our bonds will bleed like a pig. The only reason for buying long bonds is short-term or as a desperate haven for terrorized investors. But the potential to make longer-term real money is naught.
By background I’m both a Quaker and a Yorkshireman, which I like to call double jeopardy.
As a professional, you can afford to pick some stocks and be wrong about a few of them. To keep your job, you cannot take the risk of being seen to be wrong about the ‘big picture’ for very long.
The language ‘It’s too late’ is very unsuitable for most environmental issues. It’s too late for the dodo and for people who’ve starved to death already, but it’s not too late to prevent an even bigger crisis. The sooner we act on the environment, the better.
We live on a finite planet. We have finite resources, and we’re running out of good, arable land.
Remember that history always repeats itself. Every great bubble in history has broken. There are no exceptions.
I think I’m right-brained, incapable of managing my way out of a brown paper bag.
If there’s unemployment, having the government help reduce that unemployment, increase employment directly is a pretty good idea. It’s not driving out competition; it’s not crowding out.
Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas – the backbone of the Industrial Revolution – will be a distant memory by 2050. Much higher-cost remnants will still be available, but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply as before.
We used to live in a world where the price of resources came down steadily, and now the world has changed. You have a great mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth.
I find the parallels between how some investors refuse to recognise the trends and our reaction to some of our environmental challenges very powerful. There is an unwillingness to process unpleasant data.
Bubbles have quite a few things in common, but housing bubbles have a spectacular thing in common, and that is every one of them is considered unique and different.
I don’t mind the government accruing debts as long as every dollar is spent effectively with a high return. That works out fine. If you accumulate debts and waste your money, that’s, of course, a disaster.
Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan, but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.
The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it’s approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn’t true.
Think how weird profit margins are: We’ve got high unemployment and financial crises – and world record profit margins. People think the American market is very cheap. We don’t. The market quite incorrectly gives full credit to today’s earnings.
I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional.
Equities are boring; bonds are disgusting.
Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to.
I have an eccentric view on commodities not necessarily shared by my colleagues – or by almost anybody. And that is, we’re running out of everything.
The only investable idea I have real confidence in is farming and forestry. My family owns some forest, and now we’re closing on a farm. Make the farming more sustainable and the forestry more sustainable, and everyone benefits.
You can’t run the economy on BMWs alone. If the average person is in a pickle, how do you have a healthy economy?
I think the Fed is not designed to have effective tools to deal with the economy. It should settle for just controlling the money supply. And – if it insists, it can worry about inflation.
Battering down solar cells on the roofs of Wal-Marts in California. I think that will be some of the highest-return investments that anyone ever makes.
The stock market is overpriced. Everything is overpriced. Junk is king.
The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.
