Jeremy Grantham Quotes

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

You can't run the economy on BMWs alone. If the average person is in a pickle, how do you have a healthy economy?

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

Investment bubbles and high animal spirits do not materialize out of thin air. They need extremely favorable economic fundamentals together with free and easy, cheap credit, and they need it for at least two or three years. Importantly, they also need serial pleasant surprises in such critical variables as global GNP growth.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

At least us old men remember what a real bear market is like, and the young men haven't got a clue.

- Jeremy Grantham

I think I'm right-brained, incapable of managing my way out of a brown paper bag.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

If you're saying something that people don't want to hear or accept, a significant proportion of them will reply with hostility. Not because they know the facts, or because they have researched it themselves, but because they're so psychologically involved in believing good news that they will oppose it with a reflex.

- Jeremy Grantham

There is no single theory that is used in economics that considers the finite nature of resources. It's shocking.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

You don't get rewarded for taking risk; you get rewarded for buying cheap assets. And if the assets you bought got pushed up in price simply because they were risky, then you are not going to be rewarded for taking a risk; you are going to be punished for it.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

By background I'm both a Quaker and a Yorkshireman, which I like to call double jeopardy.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

History speaks pretty clearly that the markets do better with Democrats. Republicans' ideas of what constitutes fiscal responsibility simply are not good for the stock market. Democrats have many tendencies, but one of them is to look after the workers, and actually that tends to be good for demand and good for markets.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

The stock market is overpriced. Everything is overpriced. Junk is king.

- Jeremy Grantham

Modern agriculture has been accurately described as a way of turning oil into food. As the price of oil continues to rise, so will the price of food.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

Remember that history always repeats itself. Every great bubble in history has broken. There are no exceptions.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional.

- Jeremy Grantham

Capitalism believes that its remit is exclusively to make maximum short-term profits.

- Jeremy Grantham

We live on a finite planet. We have finite resources, and we're running out of good, arable land.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

I like to be right. I try not to miss the big ideas, forget the little ones, and try to get them right. End of job description.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

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.

- Jeremy Grantham

Equities are boring; bonds are disgusting.

- Jeremy Grantham

I consider most of the talent in the financial world to be suboptimal. It could be better placed earning its living in the real world.

- Jeremy Grantham