← Merryn Talks Money
Merryn Talks Money
GMO's Jeremy Grantham on buying start-ups, an AI bubble and why the small-cap premium is a myth
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- [00:00]
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Jeremy Grantham
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Jeremy Grantham
For stuff I don't need in my mobile plan?
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Jeremy Grantham
A lot of people get rich in the stock market for the time being it doesn't change the laws of nature. The higher the market, the lower the returns will be. And I think the probabilities that AI will not bust are slim to none. It meets every condition of the railroads and the Internet. It's a powerful idea that's attracted everybody's money. No one has any doubts. They had no doubts about the railroads and the Internet. Why would they? They were brilliant ideas. And this is perhaps the most consequential idea. And you know, even if it kills us all, that doesn't matter since we're all dead.
- [02:27]
Maren Somerset Webb
Welcome to Marin Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I am Maren Somerset Webb and this week I am speaking with Jeremy Grantham. Now for my entire career plus a bit. Jeremy has been one of the most distinctive and the most well known contrarian voices in global investing. The British investor, co founder of gmo, the Boston based asset manager. He built his reputation warning constantly about bubbles, everything from the Japanese bubble to the great dot com bubble in 2000 to housing in the run up to the global financial financial crisis. So with that track record, he is known by everybody as something of a perma bear. Is he really a perma bear or is he not? His new book rather suggests he is. The title, the Making of a Perma Bear. The Perils of Long Term Investing in a Short Term World. Grantham reflects on the experiences that have shaped his outlook and brought him to this position. We've had Jeremy on before but Jeremy, it is so marvelous to have you back. Welcome to marantalksmoney.
- [03:26]
Jeremy Grantham
Hi, nice to be back.
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Maren Somerset Webb
The book is absolutely jammed full of the lessons that you have learned along the way. And I suppose the first bit of that was in the 70s and 80s when you were really getting going. And later into the 90s, this idea that all of the premiums that people think exist, the small cap premium, the this premium, that premium, none of these things really exist. The only thing that you found that really works is, is value. That's it. In the end.
- [03:53]
Jeremy Grantham
There's one exception to that. I think we made probably many mistakes in the book and that's quality. A AAA bond yields a point less than you tell a B bond, let's say, and everyone thinks that's right and proper. You buy a high quality bond, you take less risk, you should make less return. But the AAA stocks do not. The AAA stocks actually have slightly outperformed the rest of the market. Something close to half a point in perpetuity. And that is a free lunch. They should be -1.8% real for the market. It should be 7% real, surely for high quality. And it's been 8 and a half and that is ridiculous. And that's always been a dagger to the heart of the efficient market hypothesis. And we took it very seriously and built lots of quality into even our small cap value portfolio.
- [04:48]
Maren Somerset Webb
Okay, and the other thing that you added in was momentum. There was a period when you were running value plus momentum which seemed like an excellent idea. And as you said, the fact that momentum works is another dagger to the heart of anyone who believes in efficient markets, but is explained purely by the fact that we are human.
- [05:06]
Jeremy Grantham
One of the very famous professors had said Categorically, there is no information in pricing alone. And I was able to say if from the day he wrote that book, you bought the stocks that advanced the highest 10% the year before and you held them for the following year, you made three or four points a year for the next 20 years.
- [05:27]
Maren Somerset Webb
So why don't we always only do that? Why bother with the rest?
- [05:31]
Jeremy Grantham
Well, because as in many things in life, just as you get good at it and happy with it and think it's a free lunch, it dribbles away. So it's much more difficult and smaller than it was back in 1982. Yeah.
- [05:48]
Maren Somerset Webb
As soon as you see it, it disappears.
- [05:50]
Jeremy Grantham
Well, it wasn't. That's the tease. It was there for 20 years, it got us thoroughly hooked and then kind of dribbled away slowly but surely going.
- [06:00]
Maren Somerset Webb
Back to small caps. I mean, there is a persistent belief that there is a small cap premium that is not necessarily just about value, it's about small caps in themselves. And I know that people will look at that and they say, well, this premium still exists. It's just that the cycles of underperformance are incredibly long. But over the long term, there is a small cap premium.
- [06:21]
Jeremy Grantham
We based our entire firm at Battery march on small cap, and it did brilliantly well. And so we moved into a larger cat value as we started gmo. But small cap is very complicated because how do you define it? You define it by shuffling the pack every year. And that isn't a buy and hold, that's a value technique, isn't it? When you shuffle the small cap, what you're doing is selling the winners and buying the losers.
- [06:54]
Maren Somerset Webb
Yeah.
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Jeremy Grantham
You're automatically reducing, so you're increasing the value. If your small cap do very well, they become medium cap and you get rid of them. And if medium cap does very badly, it becomes a small cap and you acquire it. And you do that quite a lot every year. And if you take that out, there's no evidence that small cap works.
- [07:14]
Maren Somerset Webb
I mean, this is the fascinating idea that the small cap premium doesn't exist in simply a function of the reshuffling premium. Yeah. It's a rebalancing.
- [07:23]
Jeremy Grantham
The rebalancing value effect.
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Maren Somerset Webb
Yeah.
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Jeremy Grantham
And even in value stocks, a lot of that, about half of it back in the day was due to reshuffling. Because there again, you become a value stock. If you're a growth stock that does really badly, you become a value stock. And if you're a value stock that really does well, you become a growth stock. So you have that reshuffling and regression to the mean being what it was at least for 50 years until recently. That was also a guarantee that value would do much better. And it did. So it was 100% of small cap. And the other thing about small cap and value is that they're low quality. They are really junk. You should expect a premium. And in the case of small cap, you do not get a premium that is big enough to justify the low quality historically. You get the reshuffling premium and you get the low quality premium, and that's it.
- [08:20]
Maren Somerset Webb
Okay, so the recent underperformance of small caps is really a function of the underperformance of value.
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Jeremy Grantham
Yeah, no, partly that. And I suspect that the kind of rhythm of capitalism has shifted post 2000 quite a lot. And we have allowed the fairly steady growth of monopoly so that the concentration in each industry has gone up, some dramatically and some marginally, but they've gone up in every industry group. And that's a measure of the rich and powerful and the monopolist. And it's terrific for making money. Monopoly, it's not terrific for GDP growth. So the GDP growth has steadily slowed since 2000. You don't get that feeling reading about marketplaces. You get the feeling that we're whoopi. This has never been growth like this, but it's not true. The growth rate of the total GDP has slowed quite substantially since 2000 and it appears to be slowing again. And that I think is the same thing. Monopolies are bad for GDP and good for corporate profits. So corporate profits are a higher percentage of the total pie now than they have ever been in history. This is the era of the rich and powerful and the big corporations having all the power and making a lot more money and the small corporations and the individuals below 50% getting squeezed. So they have never been. They have never had a smaller fraction of the assets, the bottom 50%. They've never had a smaller fraction of income. And the same with small corporations. They have been squeezed and squeezed. And that's fine for the S and P. It's fine for aggregate profits and the domination of the largest hundred names, which has become steadily stronger and stronger.
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Maren Somerset Webb
Well, this is interesting. It brings us back to the one of your core ideas, the reversion to the mean. Because the dynamic that we're talking about here slows and disrupts everything reverting to the mean. Right. So if we go back to talking about some of the earlier bubbles that you talked about a lot, say let's go back to the 1990s where you talked a lot about mean reversion and there was a, that wonderful image that you use of feathers in a storm. You know, you throw up feathers in a storm and they will eventually hit the ground. You can't say when, you can't say where, but one thing you can know for certain is they will hit the ground. There will be a reversion to the mean. And so when you go back to those, those earlier bubbles, the tech bubble, the great bubble in Japan, et cetera, that held good, you could see it and, and feel it coming, right?
- [11:13]
Jeremy Grantham
Yes. And I, I have no reason to doubt that that is still the same. The iron law, sadly, is that if you double the price of an asset, you halve the return from holding it. From there on, if you take the Yield down from 8%. And by the way, in 1974, to get into our portfolio, you had to have a yield of 10% and the market sold at 7 times earnings. So don't think that 8 and 10% yields ever exist. But if you take the 10 down to 5, it's pretty obvious to anyone. A, you've made a lot of money, you've doubled your money, and B, from then on you're going to have a much reduced return by 5% a year of yield alone, plus or minus whatever the market does in the future. And that's it, guys. If you want to have the highest market in history, you will have the lowest returns in history going forward. And that is just a simple mathematical relationship. And it will happen this time. And my guess is after a while, sooner or later the market will become a whole lot cheaper. It may not become as cheap as it was in 1974. It may not even get back to the trend from 1900 to 2000, but it will get a whole lot cheaper than it is today. I don't think we're willing to settle for the embedded return at these levels, which if it gets back to recent trend even, you'll have a negative return for the next 10 years and you won't have much for the next 20 years.
- [12:51]
Maren Somerset Webb
Yeah. Should we go back to the 1990s? Because I found that very interesting. There's lots in the book about the debates that you had, these kind of rock star style debates between you and the great bulls about what was going to happen, what wasn't going to happen. And it was here where I suppose you really made your name with ordinary investors. Obviously you were letters before that were all fascinating. Performance was amazing. Lots of great stuff happening. It was in this run up to the end of the tech bubble where I think suddenly you were all over Barron's and Forbes talking about these things. And to you it was very obvious bubble. You went to all these debates, you spoke to all these investment committees, et cetera. And for everyone else it didn't seem to be so clear. But in fact, one of the things that you talk about is how really everybody knew. Everybody knew, but they couldn't take the career risk or the benchmark risk of accepting the truth.
- [13:47]
Jeremy Grantham
One of the most important things I ever did and one of the keys in the book no one ever takes any interest in, and that is when I was debating the bulls, I would ask the audience a few questions. And these were, this was the critical one was the national, the annual meeting of the Financial Analyst Society. And it was in Los Angeles, I think, certainly in California. And there was a cast of thousands in her. 1500 people or so.
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Maren Somerset Webb
Yeah.
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Jeremy Grantham
And before I did my debate, I was allowed to go first by Jeremy Siegel, now Dean of Wharton. And I eagerly accepted. And then I played a dirty trick by asking the audience, hands up, who considered themselves full time professional stock players, institutional stock players, and 400, according to me and my friends counting about 400 put their hands up. And I said, right, I have two, two questions only for you. One, if the current PE, which is 31, comes down to 17 anytime in the next 10 years, will it guarantee a major bear market? And the vote was 100%. They said, yes, it would guarantee. So I said, right, now we get to the jackpot, how many of you think it will come down? And I was so shocked, I had to ask the question three times. Rephrase it. Only two people in the audience of that 400 thought it would not come down to 17. And of course it did. Yes, but 398 people in the engine room of the Goldman Sachses and the JP Morgans and so on Morgan Stanleys, they believed in data that guaranteed a major bear market in the future. And the people on the podium, however, their bosses or their marketing bosses, let's put it that way, were saying, jeremy, Jeremy, let's be serious. Don't get so carried away. The market is okay and we'll muddle through. I think that's a fair statement for the top of the market. And people don't get that. They thought, because they only hear the bosses, they thought that intelligent opinion was that the market would keep going. In fact, intelligent research opinion, the real experts would have said, we guarantee a major bubble breaking here Interesting. And no one knew that and no one cared when I pointed it out. In the end, we had over 1,000 people polled who were claiming to be professionals.
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Maren Somerset Webb
Yeah. So while you looked like an outlier with your opinions there in the late 90s, in fact, the engine room agreed with you.
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Jeremy Grantham
Absolutely. And what we found then and ever since is the obvious fact that it's not a business strategy to be a bear in a bubble. You have to be a bull. You can't take the career risk of the bull market going on a year or two longer than you thought, so you can't do it. So you. You jump off the cliff together. And as Kane said, you're okay. If you do that, you will never lose your job. Just be a little quicker and slicker, get out a little faster and more thoroughly, get back in more timely, and that will do you fine. The last thing you want to do is something where you run the risk of being wrong on your own. If you do that, he said, quote, you will not receive much mercy because sooner or later you'll be wrong or wrong enough and you'll get fired. Which we did, particularly in that bubble.
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Maren Somerset Webb
That was an enormous amount of business in the late 90s.
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Jeremy Grantham
And quickly, we had a good record. And then in two and a quarter years, 98, 99 and early 2000s, we lost about half our market share. Everyone else was going through the roof and we were dropping. We dropped from 30 billion to 20. In a bull market, that's not bad.
- [18:00]
Maren Somerset Webb
Not bad at all. And then, interestingly, once you were proven right, which everyone knew you would be, that money didn't come back. Those old clients didn't come back to you. That was a really interesting behavioral tick. They didn't want to admit to the wrongness of moving the money away. So they just didn't come back.
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Jeremy Grantham
No, no. And again, how difficult that is. You have to imagine selling a stock at 3 and buying it back at 12. You can't do that kind of stuff. Ordinary humans can't.
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Maren Somerset Webb
But of course, the lessons here are for the ordinary investor. The individual investor doesn't have career risk, doesn't have benchmark risk. It can be more honest about their investing. And when you go into the lessons Learned from the 1990s, lesson number one is do not believe the consensus and particularly the bullish propaganda.
- [18:52]
Jeremy Grantham
Yeah, the individuals have a huge advantage. Lack of career risk. They could really nail it. Wait until it's obvious that there is a bubble. Easily defined by the way we do it. Two sigma. But you can do it by just looking at the moving average PE and when it's clearly in the top 5%, better yet, 2.5%. Get your tail out of the market and you can do it. And every time in history so far, in every major stock market, that will have made you money. And you don't have to get out into money under your mattress. You can get out into whatever is reasonably priced. In January. The last time we talked and podcast I did at the beginning of this year was saying there is nothing to worry about outside the US this is a very focused market, rather like the tech bubble of 2000 was. But the rest of the world then and early this year was really quite reasonable. And international value is up 45% in the last year. And Japan is up a lot. Emerging markets is up 35 or 40. They've all trashed the S and P. The S and P did much better than one would have expected. Of course, that happens in every great bubble that has happened several years. That's the definition of a great bubble. If they turn down conveniently, they're just ordinary bubbles. If they keep going for a year or two or three, like Japan and the tech bubble and this one, they become the great bubbles. And this one looked like a bubble ready to break. In 2021, December 2021, I wrote a quarterly called Let the Wild Rumpus Begin, because every condition that I look for was in place and it was a nice bear market. It went down 25%, the MAG7 went down almost 50. The growth stocks went down 35. And the bond market went down more than any year in history. But the market didn't go down to trend. It didn't go down as much as I would have thought. And the reason for that was pretty clear at the time. And that was Chad in December of that year, interfering with a nice bear market, in my opinion. And a chat rattled every cage because once you'd visited it, I visited about day three or something like this, and I asked it to summarize War and peace in 12 points, which it did. And then I said, please do that in German. And I thought, holy cow, this is going to do some things unbelievably well. And it's become obvious to everybody that AI is very significant. And the capex, the capital spending around that has become so prodigious that it carried the market up initially, kicking and screaming. The market for 11 months went down x the Mag 7 in 2023, but the Mag 7 went up so much that the S and P went up and finally the ordinary stocks threw in the towel and joined in. And the capex has really kept the economy ticking over quite nicely. Without the capex associated with AI, of course, we would have been a flat to down economy. And the hard thing there is the Keynesian effect of animal spirits. If you took out AI and you took out the massive CapEx, one and a half percent extra of GDP, what would animal spirits be like? They might easily have tipped into a recession.
- [22:32]
Maren Somerset Webb
Yeah, the recession. The most predicted recession in history. That didn't happen.
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Jeremy Grantham
Well, yeah, but it didn't happen because AI. And AI is. You can live a couple of lifetimes and not bump into something like AI, I expect. I think it's probably much more significant than anything we've experienced. And we've experienced some pretty important things really. The ability to stream any movie you want at the touch of a finger. These are all quite remarkable. And then read the papers and then do this and then your emails. The Internet has been really very important. But I think almost everyone agrees that potentially this is bigger. Of course it may wipe us all out. I've just finished the book, if anyone builds it. Everyone Dies.
- [23:28]
Maren Somerset Webb
Yes. Yes. That's a depressing title.
- [23:30]
Jeremy Grantham
Isn't it pretty? It's a wonderful title. Who doesn't envy that title? It's one of the more effective titles I can think of.
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- [26:41]
Maren Somerset Webb
Let's talk about the US Market now. I mean, you've sat through a lot of bubbles here, including even the nifty 50, right, which I think you said was the the only real quality bubble in history. And some might argue that in AI we have another quality bubble. You know, earnings exist. There's not dot com, not dot com. It's not so obviously a bubble as many of the other bubbles that that we've sat through. How does it look to you now? Has anything changed since our conversation a year ago?
- [27:06]
Jeremy Grantham
I think it's obviously a bubble, and I think it's quite a simple story. Bubbles occur when there's some crummy idea that gets touted. People often say that and think that, and it's simply not true. All the bubbles are associated with serious things, and the more serious, the bigger the bubble. And if it's important, really important, perhaps more important than anything else, and if it's obvious, then you're dealing with the handful, like the railroads. Everyone knew the railroads would change the world for the better. Everyone knew it was the most powerful idea they'd come across in their lives. And it was. And everyone put their money in and everyone wanted to buy to build yet another railroad between Manchester and Leeds. And so you had multiple tracks and everybody lost their money and the bubble broke and it brought the economy to its needs for a year or two. And then it regrouped and the railroads carried us to glory. And then Internet, the same. You know, Amazon went up six or seven times in 99. And then in the break it came down 92%. I am not kidding. You check it.
- [28:27]
Maren Somerset Webb
Amazing.
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Jeremy Grantham
In three years of decline, Amazon comes down 92% despite being the key idea really of that generation. And then inherits the world in the rally. And that's the way it works. And just think about Japan too. Japan was terrifying. Even American industry, they were making better semiconductors, much better televisions. Everyone bragged about their 8 inch black and white Sony TV in the kitchen. Everything was Japanese. And then it broke. And that's the way it goes. That was the biggest bubble in history, by the way. Japan, biggest equity bubble in a major country and the biggest real estate bubble in history.
- [29:13]
Maren Somerset Webb
At the same time.
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Jeremy Grantham
At the same time. That's the real. No, no, by the way, do that separately. Do it separately, unless you want to spend 20 years in the wilderness, which they have.
- [29:25]
Maren Somerset Webb
But then there's. Let's go back then to this idea of monopolies and constantly rising profit margins. And one of the things you keep going back to in the book is this idea that what, what stock markets really like is relatively stable GDP growth, doesn't really matter how high or low as long as it's stable. Low inflation and rising profit margins. And one of the things that you see now is all those things are there and profit margins just don't seem to have reverted to the mean. And we've been sitting around expecting that mean reversion for a long time. Hasn't happened. Because I think of what you were mentioning earlier about the rise of the oligopolies and monopolies preventing it from happening. So does that mean that this market could go on for longer than even you might expect?
- [30:09]
Jeremy Grantham
This is the canary that gets swept up in the hurricane with a couple of feathers. Yeah, from my experiment in Florida. And it literally happens. Tropical birds do get swept up in hurricanes and scent hundreds and hundreds of miles north. And it happens once in a blue moon. And this is what's happening now where we're watching the canary in the hurricane. We're watching these profit margins go higher and higher and higher. And they had, obviously, I would have said obviously in a normal world, reached excessive levels. And then we hit the current administration, who can't spell the words excessive levels and they're very happy with a continued concentration into the super powerful companies. And the super powerful companies are allowed to use their influence, so why not? They do. And the more influence they have, the higher the profit margins go. It's a perfectly good game. And a lot of people get rich in the stock market for the time being. It doesn't change the laws of nature. The higher the market, the lower the returns will be. And I think the probabilities that AI will not bust are slim to none. It meets every condition of, of the railroads and the Internet. It's a powerful idea that's attracted everybody's money. No one has any doubts. They had no doubts about the railroads and the Internet. Why would they? They were brilliant ideas. And this is perhaps the most consequential idea. And even if it kills us all, that doesn't matter since we're all dead. So. And if it doesn't, then you reckon you own the right thing. That's the appeal. And so my guess is Nvidia will lead it down and all the others will follow for a while and then out of the ashes, several of them will once again inherit the.
- [32:20]
Maren Somerset Webb
Inherit the earth, like Amazon did. I mean it's. And what will prompt that? I mean, if we go back to the Nifty50, everything went so right for so long and then it didn't take much in the way of little bits of failure creeping in here and there for everyone to lose confidence. It's something like that, isn't it?
- [32:38]
Jeremy Grantham
I did a lot of research on the Nifty 50 and they'd had an abnormal 10 year window when no one failed. The Nifty 50 went on to be the Nifty 5010 years later. Ten years after that, five, six or seven of them had been decapitated, literally. Avon out of business sort of thing. And Xerox and wonderful huge powerful companies one minute and ten years later, hanging on by their fingernails, soon to go out of business. And the list was pretty extensive. And that will do. Broke the bubble. They had a 50% premium on fair value for the only time in history. And they haven't had a big premium despite the Mag 7. They have not had a big premium recently.
- [33:29]
Maren Somerset Webb
Yeah. So we should ask, what should people do now? As you say, we talked about international value, we talked about the great opportunities that were out with the us. There was loads to invest in then. So if you followed the advice that you gave at the beginning of last year, you would have had a marvelous 20, 25. It's not quite so easy now is it?
- [33:48]
Jeremy Grantham
No, it's not as attractive. It's even easier psychologically because you're buying things that have done pretty well and absolutely much, much cheaper than the US Still. And my colleagues assure me that they're reasonably priced still. They've gone from cheap, which is much better, to reasonably priced or a modest premium. But compared to the U.S. they're so brilliant. I would stand my ground indeed, in my family accounts. That's precisely what I'm doing. But the question is, having gone up 45%, how much more am I willing to take before taking profits? I think another 20%. I will start to reduce that position, but I think it's, for the time being it's looking pretty good.
- [34:37]
Maren Somerset Webb
Okay, and what about precious metals? I mean, I know that obviously gold is not your obsession like some of us, but there have been times in your career where you have bought gold. I think 2007 you were buying gold. Would you touch precious metals now or is that moved into bubble territory, do you think?
- [34:52]
Jeremy Grantham
I'm afraid I'm psychologically crippled now on precious metals. I have done so badly that I think I should leave them alone. They have no dividend and you can't eat them and so on. And yes, they have a 20,000 year or 12,000 year head start over, over Bitcoin that suffers from the same lack of eatability or dividend flow. And silver is a little different. Silver has a lot of growing commercial value, but a lot of it is faith as well. So I leave that for someone else. It's not investing in any traditional sense any more than bitcoin is. Yeah, it's psychological stuff, psychological backup.
- [35:42]
Maren Somerset Webb
But we need that. We need that. But let me ask you then, one of the. We spoke about Alan Greenspan a little earlier and you were very critical of him in the, in the run up to the dot com bubble. You felt that he didn't understand how dangerous bubbles were and what he was leading us into with monetary policy. And then you weren't particularly impressed with Ben Bernanke either. I remember you saying that he'd spent a lot of time studying the 1930s and taken every single wrong conclusion from that study. And so there is this controversy now this week about the role of the Fed and the independence of central banks. How do you feel about that?
- [36:16]
Jeremy Grantham
Let me just have one swing. Quick swing at Bernanke.
- [36:20]
Maren Somerset Webb
Okay.
- [36:20]
Jeremy Grantham
Bernanke presides over the biggest housing bubble, the only housing bubble up till then in US history. The US Housing market had bubbled in Florida, crashed simultaneously in Texas and it kept pretty much even as a country. It needed Greenspan's relentless pressure on lowering rates to bubble the entire US real estate market at the same time, and based on the prices, it went to three sigma, much higher than 2000 tech bubble, much higher than today's bubble in equities. It was, statistically speaking, the great outlier, like Japan in the US market was our housing market went from very stable to a Himalayan peak. And right at the peak, he said the U.S. housing market merely reflects a strong U.S. economy. The U.S. housing market has never bust. And he was right. The US housing market had never bust. And as I wrote at the time, it had never bust because it had never bubbled before. And every bubble has always broken. And if you look at that housing bubble, it is perfect. Three years up, three years down. It looks like that. How is it possible for the Fed boss, with his statisticians, his advisors, right at the peak of a three sigma outlier, to say that the business is normal? Please explain. It's incomprehensibly stupid for someone who has studied 1929. Anyway, on to now, I am slightly, no, I am moderately less against the current guy than his predecessors. I think he started very much in tune with them, with the three, the bubble three, I think, of them. And then he became a little more serious. And you can't be serious in today's world without expecting some career risk.
- [38:23]
Maren Somerset Webb
Yes, fair enough. You said earlier when we were talking, that now may be one of the examples of turning points in history when the institutions are wrong, when the groups, the institutions that may have been trusted for some time are no longer trustable.
- [38:42]
Jeremy Grantham
Yes. And I think this is the biggest failing of ordinary investors is a failure to realize that if you've done your homework, you've looked at the data, you really can be right. And the authorities can be wrong at turning points. The authorities are nearly always wrong. And I don't think it's. It's a bug. I think it's part of the system that they will be wrong for the following reason. If you have a large organization, you will typically be led by someone with substantial political skills. Right? And if you have political skills, you understand keynes in chapter 12 better than anybody. Never be wrong on your own or you will not receive much mercy. Just make sure that all your mistakes have plenty of company and you'll do fine. And so what happens at a turning point is. Turning points are lethal. No one can accept the career risk of a turning point. So they all predict it will keep going. They all look around nervously at each other, but they keep going. As long as the music's playing, they're going to be dancing. Doesn't matter that they know the market is silly, they're still dancing and they've confessed to it and we know that that's how it works. And then when one of them jumps, another jumps and pretty soon every last one of them jump, because last one out is a donkey.
- [40:15]
Maren Somerset Webb
Yeah. And what do you think the institutions, the authorities, are mainly wrong about at the moment?
- [40:20]
Jeremy Grantham
You just have to say to yourself what is likely to be a great turning point. Yes, I think it's obvious that Internet investing, near term, regardless of how well it does in the long term, that near term it will be overdone and it will have a bust. And I expect the authorities to be completely relaxed about that and not mention it in round numbers. Or if they mention it, mention it in a way that will not be taken seriously. And there's been a few of those.
- [40:50]
Maren Somerset Webb
So the retail investor can be ahead of them.
- [40:52]
Jeremy Grantham
I think also about the share of profits. There are many ways to have your share of profits drop and it may be that you can squeeze the bottom half so much that it weakens the structure of gdp. You have no demand, no dependable demand because they have no money. They can't pay their auto loans. And the automobile industry starts to collapse. After all, if you only sold cars to the top half, you would go out of business. And that's the risk. And that's clearly at a peak that goes all the way back to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. We have more inequality. The retail world, the consumption world, is kept going by the very rich, by the top 10%. They account for an unprecedented large fraction of the total. And how long can that go on before the poor just can't buy enough for certain day to day products like automobiles and so on?
- [42:11]
Maren Somerset Webb
Is that not partly just a function of an aging society, the continent?
- [42:15]
Jeremy Grantham
No, I don't think so. I think it's part of an unequal society and you can have aging and inequality running quite separately. I believe Japan is not that unequal, by the way. Much further down the aging cycle than we are, but much less far down the inequality cycle than we are.
- [42:34]
Maren Somerset Webb
There are a few more things I really want to ask you before we end. And the first is that you talk quite a lot in the book about venture capital and how that is your obsession at the moment is investing back to your obsessions. Is investing purely via venture capital as opposed to in the listed markets. Is that something that everyone else should be doing too? Or is that something that is particularly good for a very rich long term foundation such as yours?
- [42:59]
Jeremy Grantham
I like it in abstract because when you buy and sell shares, you're not helping the GDP in any way. You're just shuffling the paper. And if you don't own it, someone else owns it. It doesn't make any difference. It's fun, it might make you money, but it's irrelevant. When you do a venture capital project, you are facilitating the best in the world structure for getting masses of new ideas into business. It is so good that they come from all over the world, people with a great idea, with real ambition. They come to America and 25% of the CEOs are foreign born, relatively young people. And on some measures it's up to 50% for this and that and the other. But certainly we draw them in because we have the best system and we are much, much better and always have been at starting new firms, taking risks, raising money, losing money, trying again, pivoting all those good things so it is dramatically more dynamic and useful venture capital. So I like that. Okay, secondly, if you hit one, Digital Equipment made its investors 2,000 times their money, work that one out. The best we have ever had is 200 on Snapchat. And it was a tiny position, sadly. But you don't need. If we'd had that on a big one, that would have made our foundation for life, more or less. But we join this with our mission. We are trying to make a difference in climate change and to address climate change technology to help drive down green energy costs, geothermal, fusion, all of these things that is terrific for the world if you win, terrific for the returns to the foundation if you win. And there is every reason to believe that if you have 100 of those on average, you'll make a decent return. The money comes back, you put it out again and again and again ad infinitum. So a portfolio of mission driven venture capital, with any luck, will have a dramatic effect.
- [45:21]
Maren Somerset Webb
Okay, so if you were starting, if you are starting out again today, Jeremy, you say, I mean, I know that you come to the end of the book saying that you actually think that investment management is something of a trivial industry. And in the beginning, you know, you loved it for its ideas, its creativity and for making you rich, et cetera. But you get to the end of your career and you look back and you say, well, maybe that was a little trivial. I don't agree, by the way, but we haven't got time for that. But if. If you were starting out today, I'm.
- [45:47]
Jeremy Grantham
Surprised you don't agree.
- [45:48]
Maren Somerset Webb
I don't agree because I. We'll talk about this another time.
- [45:51]
Jeremy Grantham
But for me, given your job, your career risk would prevent you from.
- [45:55]
Maren Somerset Webb
No, I agree in lots of ways that there are all sorts of problems with it. But on the other hand, the investment industry over time does a perfectly adequate job of taking people's savings and maintaining them for them while they do other things. And I think that is a very, very valuable thing to do.
- [46:12]
Jeremy Grantham
So there's that, but it's not nearly as valuable as the venture capital effect.
- [46:17]
Maren Somerset Webb
Fair, but most people can't be in venture capital all the time. So my question was, if you were starting again today, I think starting a business like yours is much harder in an olig. Oligopolistic world. But to a young person today, what would you say? Don't be doing this investment management business. Maybe go into something VC or maybe just go study engineering or what would you say to a young person starting out?
- [46:39]
Jeremy Grantham
I'd say. I'd say all of that.
- [46:41]
Maren Somerset Webb
All of that.
- [46:42]
Jeremy Grantham
There are so many long term uncomfortable risks coming along faster than most people realize that it would be good to have some practical skills. So get a practical skill or get into venture capital and study useful lines of attack such as the ones I was describing. But regenerative farming, we need to farm in a more sustainable way.
- [47:08]
Maren Somerset Webb
Absolutely.
- [47:09]
Jeremy Grantham
We need to do a lot of things in a more sustainable way, but certainly we need nearly infinite green energy. That's the biggest one of all, I think. And we may, by the way, geothermal. If you do a good job on how you convert that energy, if you learn to make do with a lower temperature. Bingo. If you learn to drill and handle the heat. Bingo. These are fabulous ideas that could give you 24 hour, dependable, cheap, infinite heat. You don't run out, by the way. The heat from the center of the earth just keeps going. Outlives all by a lot.
- [47:51]
Maren Somerset Webb
Okay, so kids go back into farming.
- [47:53]
Jeremy Grantham
I mean, outlive Homo sapiens. Not a single life.
- [47:56]
Maren Somerset Webb
Well, we don't know if we're gonna live another couple of weeks at this rate, do we? Or the book you're reading?
- [47:59]
Jeremy Grantham
No, we don't.
- [48:01]
Maren Somerset Webb
Jeremy, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been great talking to you.
- [48:04]
Jeremy Grantham
Yeah, thank you for having me.
- [48:07]
Maren Somerset Webb
Thanks for listening to this week's Merrin Talks Money. And if you want to watch this episode, check it out on YouTube if you like our show, rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen podcasts and keep sending questions or comments to marinmoneyoomberg.net you can also follow me and John on Twitter or x. I'm Ernesw And John is JohnStepek. This episode was hosted by me, Marin Somerset Web. It was produced by Sama Saadi and Moses Andam, with help this week from Stacy Wong, sound design by Blake Maples and Aaron Casper, and special thanks, of course, to Jeremy Grantham.
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