We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP650: Stock Market Bubbles, AI, & Climate Change w/ Jeremy Grantham
Episode Date: August 9, 2024On today’s episode, Clay Finck is joined by investing legend and bubble historian, Jeremy Grantham. Jeremy gives his updated views on the recent stock market run up, how today’s market compares to... market bubbles of the past, and indicators that point to the potential bear market that lies ahead. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 01:49 - Lessons Jeremy learned from his early career investing in the 1960s. 06:13 - How today’s market compares to previous superbubbles in the 1920s, 1989, 1999, and 2007. 12:11 - Jeremy’s view on the market rally since 2022, and the impact of the overcentration of the Magnificent 7 in the S&P 500. 17:40 - Why bubbles tend to last longer than we would expect them to. 31:56 - Whether using the P/E ratio is a reliable way to value the broader market. 36:29 - The major flaw in projecting compounding growth into the future from here. 44:55 - What Jeremy is seeing for innovation in the green energy space. And so much more! Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Check out GMO’s website. GMO’s new US Quality ETF. Related Episode: Listen to TIP542: The Crisis Bigger Than Banks w/ Jeremy Grantham, or watch the video. Related Episode: TIP466: The Bear Has Arrived w/ Jeremy Grantham, or watch the video. Related Episode: TIP371: The Top of the Cycle w/ Jeremy Grantham, or watch the video. Follow Clay on Twitter. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Hardblock AnchorWatch Cape Intuit Shopify Vanta reMarkable Abundant Mines HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
On today's episode, I'm joined by investing legend in market historian Jeremy Grantham.
Jeremy is the co-founder and investment strategist at GMO, one of the world's most well-respected
asset managers with tens of billions of dollars in AUM.
Jeremy gives us an updated view on the recent stock market run-up, how today's market
compares to market bubbles over the past century, and indicators that point to the potential
bare market that lies ahead.
Jeremy successfully sidestepped past market bubbles such as the Japanese market in 1989, the tech
bubble in 1999, the great financial crisis in 2008, and he also successfully called the bottom
in the depths of that major market correction.
He's been calling for a market bubble for multiple years now, and he also explains here that
he's always been early in these market calls throughout much of his career.
We live in some really confusing times in markets, as the Fed is now on the cusp of lowering
interest rates, and the market concentration of the top seven companies seems to only continue to
increase. Jeremy brings to the show a wealth of wisdom and experience as he's been an investor
for well over 50 years. While we're all caught up in the day-to-day and year-to-year movements
in the markets, Jeremy helps provide a 10,000-foot overview and gives us a better sense of what is happening
in the grander scheme of things. With that, I hope you enjoy today's discussion with Jeremy Grantham.
celebrating 10 years and more than 150 million downloads.
You are listening to the Investors Podcast Network.
Since 2014, we studied the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Now, for your host, Clay Fink.
Welcome to the Investors Podcast.
I'm your host today, Clay Fink.
And today I have the great honor of being joined by investing.
Mr. Jeremy Grantham. Jeremy, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today.
It's a pleasure, Clay. Thank you for having me.
So what I really, really like about having you as a guest on the show is that you just have
so much experience in the investing industry, and you've seen so many of these different
market cycles and how people tend to behave at different points in the cycle. I wanted to
start with one question from your early career. It was back in 1968.
You had the thrill of making exceptional returns in the land of microcaps.
I was curious if you could tell us a bit about what you learned about investing during this time period.
That's carried all the way with you to today.
1968 was when I got into the business in terms of a professional career.
I'd done quite a bit of investing as an amateur before that.
And I got into the business out of consulting, which is fairly boring business,
by asking around my classmates from business school, who was having the most fun?
and a very sophisticated approach to career planning, and by a wide margin, the guys in the stock market
were having the most fun. And one of the reasons they were having a lot of fun was there was a
super bubble in microcap. It hardly got noticed in the serious market, but the little stocks were
doubling, quadrupling, and then blowing up fairly regular intervals. And a group of us in Boston
from various mutual fund groups would get together for lunch. And they were old pros because
they'd spent the first two years out of business school in the stock market and I'd been wasting
my time. And so I kept relatively quiet, listened to the conversations and would buy the
suggestion of the day and hold it for a few weeks. One year, the story was American Raceways.
And that was going to introduce Formula One Grand Prix racing, which incidentally, 50 years or so later,
is now finally creeping in a little bit. But it seemed power, noise, risk, the odd death, frashes,
It seemed very American to me.
And American Raceways had bought one track, Michigan Speedway, and they were going to have
a proper race, and they did.
And because of the novelty, everyone on their dog came, and they camped out on the hillsides
watching the cars racing around this track and generating the feeling that, wow, if we could
have that number show up 15 times a year, we were rich.
And so the stock did very well.
And the first lunch, when I met it, it was $7 a share, and I bought 300 shares and went on my summer vacation.
My wife's German. I'm English, so we squeezed out three weeks and we went to Europe.
And we came back and it was 21.
In three weeks, it had tripled.
And I like to joke that I did what any serious value manager would do.
I sold everything else I hadn't tripled up.
So now I had 900 shares.
Everything I had was in this stock.
and it was 100 by Christmas, and we were rich.
We had enough money.
We could have bought a nice house in England with no mortgage and a BMW, you know, that
kind of comfortable amount of dough.
And this was two years out of business school, so I was pretty pleased with myself.
And then I didn't get out and down it went.
I scrambled out, I scrambled out at 40 down from 100, and went into a similar, brilliant idea,
market monitored data systems, which was going to trade options.
it was putting a box, a strange looking box where you pushed the buttons and you got the price
of the option and you traded it. And it was a brilliant idea. It was just about 15 to 20 years too
early. So people had the box, but there were no options. Then they had a few options, but not
enough people had the box. And it was a pretty good lesson that you can be too early for the
marketplace. And I scrambled out of that, paid off my leverage at the bank, and had a couple of
thousand down from about 60,000. From that day on, I tended to be much more conservative and
pretty much a dedicated serious value manager for the rest of my career. Well, it's pretty humbling
that even some of the greatest bubble historians can get caught in some type of bubble. And it can
be said that it's probably better to get caught in them earlier than your career than later.
Definitely. If we fast forward to today, you've been on the show discussing what you call the super
bubble in today's markets. And I wanted to talk about your views of the market today a little bit.
We've seen a massive rally in U.S. stocks overall, that S&P 500 in particular since the fall of
2022. And we saw the S&P 500 hit a local peak in January of 2022 before declining by 25%. And then saw
over a 50% rise to today. We're recording here in July of 2024. So how about we just open this up and
just get your general view on what's fueled this rally in the market?
Well, I'll get around to that, but let me say my main interest in the market has been
as a historian, and therefore I'm cursed with a much longer horizon, 99% of the players,
and I've done my best to tailor to that and live with it. But as a historian, you have to say,
if you look at the broad sweep of history, you have to be impressed with how incredibly bad
the marketplace is as a judge of the future. So if you'll bear with me for a second, just let's go back
to 1929. It's the highest PE on trailing earnings up till then in history. By today's standard,
pretty modest, 21 times trailing. The earnings, however, have spiked. They've done brilliantly well.
The economy is booming like it was China in its heyday, probably the most rapid period of growth
in American history. Double-digit increases in industrial production, that kind of
thing. And it peaked in September 1929, September, October, 21 times trailing. And how good was that?
It was the highest price in American history. What was it projecting? It was projecting not just ordinary
times, not just not good times. It was projecting the worst 10 years in American economic history.
So you had the highest PE, the greatest bull market, not a few years before, a few days before the
beginning of the biggest wipe out in fundamentals, not the stock market. Yes, the stock market went
down colossally, but the economy collapsed, the global economy, international trade, currencies,
everything went to hell, immediately following the greatest bull market in history. So you have to
ask yourself, what was the market doing? That it not only couldn't see trouble coming, but it
apparently saw heaven coming. It could not possibly have been more wrong. So you fast forward to
Japan, which is, in a way, the mother and father of all bubbles, Japanese market had never sold over
25 times earnings until it did in 87. By 89, it was put to us that it was 65 times earnings.
As far as we could tell, the Japanese market was 65 times trailing earnings, never having sold
above 25. And this is what should put the fear of God in anyone trying to time the market,
is it gone up 150% more than it ever had in history. What did it predict? From the
The day it hit its peak in late 89, you had a lost decade, arguably a lost 20 years.
The Japanese growth went from sensational to miserable.
The Japanese market for eight minutes sold at a larger value than the U.S. market.
For an economy, the third is big.
It was incredible.
And again, we had a sensational P.E., not predicting good times, but predicting the worst
times that you could possibly have wished for for Japan for the next 20 years. If you think about the
great financial crash, it wasn't the highest PE in history, but it was pretty darned high the other
day in 2008, in early 2008. And again, from a very high level, third only to 1929 and 2000 tech bubble.
Instead of predicting good times, it predicted the worst financial crisis in modern history,
which nearly brought the entire developed world to its knees and needed the most sensational bailouts
and injection of liquidity, et cetera, to save our bacon. Incredible. So if you look at the three
great events or three of the four great events of the 20th century, you have to say absolutely
spectacularly wrong. Peak multiples projecting the worst periods of our history. Well, I often
quote Husman. I've actually never spoken to him, but he produces very good data and it's free,
which I always like. And the model that he uses that has the highest predictive value,
measuring the value of the market, is slightly higher today than it was at its two previous peaks,
1929 and 2021 December, just before the fairly decent decline of 2022. And now we're slightly higher.
This is on the most predictive measure of value that he has produced and he's worked at that.
As far as one can tell, constantly for 30 years, this is the most vulnerable market there has ever been.
And given the incredible record of the past that the highest multiples do not predict good times which you learn at business school, but have historically predicted the worst times.
It should give you cause for some concern and some caution.
And of course, the market does not feel concerned or cautious.
It didn't in 1929.
It didn't in Japan in 89.
It didn't in the US before the housing bust of 708.
That's the way the market is.
So, dear listener, get used to it.
You will not be warned the very best of times it will feel like,
the highest possible pricing, the highest possible PEs will be followed, not just by tough times,
but some of the worst times that occur. That's the historical precedent. Okay, now let's get back
to your question. Thank you for that wonderful high-level overview. I feel like we all get caught up
in what the market has done this month or this year, not recognizing where we might sit in the
grander scheme of things. So getting back to that original question, we've seen yet another rally
in the broader market since late 2022. So are you viewing this, you know, as continued enthusiasm
for the Magnificent Seven and the AI stocks? Or what are you seeing from your perspective?
Everybody kind of knows because it was so clear, blatant, if you will. Market peaks in December 21
is coming down pretty steadily, the stock market, the bond market. The worst decline in the first
half of 22 since 1939 in terms of loss of percentage value of the U.S. market. And then in November,
chat GBT comes out. And yes, to the insiders, that was spiking for a couple of years in terms
of developments. But in terms of the stock market, it was like a bolt across the sky. We knew nothing
and suddenly there it was. Chat GBT GBT. AI was everywhere. And the magnificent seven
kind of sprang to life. And the rally that took place for the first 10 months was just that,
just the seven, magnificent seven, almost all making a claim on AI. And the balance of the
S&P wasn't actually going up at all. And then in the fall of 23, the rest of the market was won
over by the sustained gain and has had a very nice rally, but nothing compared to the rally
in the magnificent seven. And that extreme concentration has been a factor in,
several great ball markets. It was in 2000, wasn't 29 to a lesser degree, but spectacularly in
2000, and here it is again. So AI played a very big role. AI is serious. Whether people will
actually make real money is another matter. But is it serious? Yes, it is. It will change the nature
of warfare completely. It will know who you are. It will have face identification. It will be an alarming
tool for governments to know what you're doing, who you are, where you are, and if necessary,
in warfare, destroy you. So it will change some very important aspects of life. Whether it will change
mundane corporate matters enough to make good money, I think a lot of people, including me,
have serious doubt. So it's a very important development. It'll be with us forever, and it will change
life in many ways. I'm not convinced it makes the market that attractive. But at the moment,
we're in the selling shovel mode, where you sell the chips to people who think they probably can use
them and they should be seen to be using them. Everyone's putting a lot of money into developing
AI products. And so the chip seller is brilliant. And it's not clear yet whether the people
paying for the chips will ever get a return on them. And we'll find out. I don't think it's inconceivable.
But it's clear that that produced the oomph to take this market that was dwindling down and produce
some fairly spectacular performance, particularly of seven stops, and to produce such broad-based
enthusiasm eventually that it drags the broader market with it to a pretty decent degree.
So I think many people expected higher interest rates and the Fed's pivot in 2022 to lead to a recession
in the U.S. after a decade of artificially low interest rates of any.
economy that was very dependent on those interest rates and all the refinancing that happened and such.
And one piece that I thought was interesting from your previous appearance on the show was that
most of the decline in the great bear markets only happen after the first interest rate cut.
So the Fed, they haven't cut rates quite yet, but they've been signaling that rate cuts are
likely coming. And China, on the other hand, just announced rate cuts as they're on the verge of
deflation and facing a lot of issues with real estate and debt levels. So I'm curious to get your take
on interest rate cuts, it appears that the market rally and declining levels of inflation. With
that, the market seems to be pricing in a soft landing for the economy.
One of the best indicators of recession is a modest upturn in unemployment. And if you see that
in a long-term chart, you'd be impressed. When the market ticks up 50 basis points,
half a percent in unemployment, 70 percent of the time it's followed by a recession. When it ticks up
0.6%, it is followed 100% of the time historically with the recession. Today, it's 0.7.
Today it is nicely, I mean, visibly above the level that historically has always predicted
the recession. Recessions have this slippery habit of taking a little longer than you would like.
It's not unique, by the way. They've done that a couple of times in the past. What they haven't done
is wriggled off the hook. Once you get the leading indicators, such as the gap between the 90
day and the 10-year bond, the early warning indicators, and then you get the tick up and inflation,
you have always had a recession, and that is the phase that we're in. So I would strongly bet,
as a historian, I would just say, you've always had a recession in these conditions. Perhaps you'll
get lucky. Perhaps this time will be very different from history. But this isn't one or two times.
This is eight or nine times out of eight or nine.
You have always had a recession in modern times.
And perhaps this will be an exception.
I wouldn't hold my breath.
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All right, back to the show.
One of the other things that I think has really duped a lot of people is just the level of
stimulus and support from the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government in 2020.
For example, for anyone that owns real estate, they are just hanging on to their homes
because they have a 30-year, 2% mortgage that they can just sit on, and they're not feeling
the effects of higher interest rates in real estate in that example.
It sort of brings to the question of the Federal Reserve has tightened economic conditions and
raised rates, and the U.S. federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits, which
stimulates the economy.
So I'm almost curious if this sort of dynamic resembles any bubbles you've studied in the past.
Each bubble is different.
We have to agree that the government policy of being stimulatory has gotten more and more intense
with the passage of time.
Even the great financial crash was nothing like the stimulus delivered for COVID.
it. And once you break out of any historical reference point, it's hard to know what will happen.
But one of the things as a kind of long-term fundamentalist I should emphasize here is that there's
no strong connection between low rates and economic growth. We had a magnificent experiment
conducted really by Greenspan. And in the 1986-87 period, we started to increase the level of
debt. And the idea is interest rates work because they allow you to take more debt. And the idea
about debt is it stimulates the economy. Well, starting in 87, after 100 years of drifting up in
debt to GDP ratio, that's all debt, government debt, corporate debt. It had drifted up for 100 years,
and then it king to the 45 degrees and went shooting up from 89 until the other day, and it tripled.
It tripled the ratio. So you have the biggest country in the world, biggest economy in the world,
I should say, tripling its debt to GDP ratio. What an interesting scientific experiment. That should
reveal something. And the growth rate of its GDP slowed clearly and considerably. The growth rate after
89 is two-thirds of what the growth rate is since the war from 1945 to 89. So you had a magnificent
experiment. Increasing the level of debt did not apparently stimulate the economy. It slowed considerably.
Now, of course, there are many other factors. It's a very complicated issue. But you would think,
think if debt is so wonderfully helpful to economic growth, it might have the least shown better
results than that. An interest rate is the second derivative. The only significance of a low interest
rate is it allows you to borrow more money. But if borrowing more money clearly in the macro level
has not had the effect of increasing GDP growth, why would we get so excited with a lower interest rate?
Secondly, why would we always forget that most of a market decline occurs after the first
rate decrease, as you referred to?
I mean, that takes talent because that goes over and over again.
We get enthusiastic about the first rate, oh, just hang on, guys, wait for the first rate cut,
and then we're back to the races.
And history is pretty clear.
Most of the decline occurs after the first rate cuts.
Why do we forget it?
Because that's who we are.
We travel optimistically.
and we like to forget unpleasant features. Let me just say, I have spent my entire life being early
in the stock market. The most important one probably was Japan. We were one of the early firms into
international investing, and we knew that Japan had never sold over 25, and by the time it got to 45,
we felt it was almost immoral to be in Japan, but Japan was 40% of the benchmark. So in the
institutional world, you take your life in your hands when you get out of something that's 40%
of the benchmark. But we did. We got out 100% and we watched it go to 60% of the benchmark.
And Japan was like a monster. It just wouldn't stop growing in the stock market. And so on.
I was three years early. But when the market broke at 65 times earnings, today, by the way,
it's just another country. It's back in the normal range and it's magnificently underperformed.
It gave every penny bag that we paid with a lot of profit. And the easiest way to make money
for 15 years was just to underweight Japan. And I'm happy to do.
say we did. And then the next big event in my life was the tech bubble of 2000. And the tech bubble,
that was based on something very real also like AI that was based on the internet. And the internet,
we can all agree, is very serious development full of potential. But there's always limits to how much
you should pay. And in early 98, the PE reached the peak of 1929, 21 times earnings, which had been
through history, the highest ever reached in 1929, became 21.1 in January 98. And we became extremely
nervous. And by mid-98, we had lowered our exposure to the U.S. market and tried to beef up our
positions in emerging markets and international markets. And debt and cash. And we watched it
rise and rise all the way through 98 and 99 and the first quarter of 2000. And it went from
21 to 35 times earnings, and that is a painful leap when you are very conservative. And we
dramatically underperformed not as much as Japan. Japan was 10 points a year for three years,
all regained with profit. This was about six points a year for two and a quarter years. And that
was enough to cost us an arm and a leg and a great bulk of our asset allocation accounts left.
And our business in a great ball market went from 30 billion to 20 billion, which is pretty
hard to do. And then the market was trashed. We made money in the decline. We made money in 2000. We made a decent
amount of money in 01, and we scraped home with a tiny, tiny positive return in 2002. But by the end of that
two and three quarter year bare market, one of the longest, incidentally, we made about 20% and the
S&P was down 50. And the NASDAQ was down 72. So that was a very handsome difference. We didn't suffer much
in the financial crash. I, for once, tended to get that more right.
than wrong and we had a very heavy position in emerging markets, which brilliantly outperformed.
It tripled the performance of the U.S. market over a six, seven year window. And then that leaves
us with this one. And once again, once the market reached the top few percentage points of history,
I was telling people to watch their tails. And of course, once again, just like Japan and the
tech bubble and even the housing bubble, it keeps going. I was three years too early in Japan,
two and a quarter years too early in the tech bubble, and clearly a couple of years are too early
here. Yes, this is unusual, and every time the market's a bit different. And we had a really
interesting decline in 22, but when you look at the new highs now, you'd have to say that if
you're blowing the whistle in 21 and saying, watch out, this is a bubble peaking, you've been
pretty handsomely early. And I just want the listeners to know that this is part of the course for me.
This is not anywhere near as brutal as Japan, and it's not as brutal as 2000, and it's extremely
painful, and one doesn't like to be early.
And the problem with being too early is, when it gets to a historical level, I tend to blow the
whistle and say, look, this is historically very dangerous and this is what's happened historically
several times, and there's no rule against the market going up more.
And Japan is the mother and father, as I said, and a warning to anyone.
You've never been over 25 times earnings, you go to 65.
You have to be ready with some part of your brain for the market to keep going.
Having said that, bear in mind that it didn't change the outcome.
It changed the timing of the outcome.
But Japan went all the way back.
It gave up every inch of ground that isn't made just because it kept going for three extra years.
It changed nothing.
There's a lot to touch on there.
I guess the other thing I would mention is that you haven't always called for an overvalued market either.
It was actually in March of 2009, you put out an article that you expected the S&P 500 to produce
double-digit returns.
And then just by happenstance, that was actually the day that the stock market bottomed out
during that great financial crisis.
I'd like to embroider that a little because one has to realize that the 21st century
has been a very much higher level PE than the 20th century.
The 20th century averaged 14 times earnings.
And we've averaged more like 20.
it's over 50% higher in the 21st century.
This is not a small change.
If you've learned your trade and you've learned your history book in the 20th century,
you are going to think that most of the time in the last 24 years has been overpriced.
And I do think that.
I think most of the time, for a variety of reasons,
a shift in monetary policy, a shift in stimulus,
an enormous increase in willingness to take debt at the government level, etc.,
has been important differences.
Also the level of monopoly that the US has allowed.
There is a concentration increase in every industry in America, and some of them fairly
brutal.
The Magnificent Seven really are international monopolies.
They have kind of death grips on their programs, on their telephones, you name it,
on their procedures that they're offering.
And of course, now on chips to produce AI.
This is not a highly competitive market with seven giant companies fighting it out.
This is not the oil industry. This is a window of history where seven, or let's say a couple of
handfuls of U.S. huge instant monopolies dominate the planet in terms of finance and stock market.
This is not your father's stock market. This is a very different state of affairs. Now, it may go on,
but it may be that Europe and eventually the U.S. will say enough is enough, as it did back in the oil
days when they broke up the super Exxon standard oil into, you tell me, five or six pieces. And other
industries too, telephone company, swapped into many pieces. We may, however, allow the big corporations
to kind of run the game. And that's one flight path. Or we may interfere and require a greater
level of competition. And that is another flight path. There's great uncertainties lurking around.
One more question before we transition to climate here, if you'll allow me to spout a bullish and optimistic viewpoint.
So you're highly, highly familiar with quality businesses and quality companies performing well, having a tendency to outperform the market, and oftentimes justify higher PE levels.
So I think a lot of bulls would argue that we shouldn't be using something like a Schiller PE to compare today's market to market to the past.
Maybe something like comparing apples to oranges, for lack of a better analogy.
So when I look at like the AI darling, Nvidia, for example, in 2023, they saw revenue growth
of 125% today.
It looks like they have a PE of around 70.
And then much of the big tech firms are growing in the mid-teens in terms of revenue growth.
You mentioned many of these companies are some of the greatest monopolies the world has ever
seen and potentially maybe justify higher multiples. I'm curious how you would respond to this point.
Well, as I say, there's a fork in the road. There's a world where you allow monopolies to get
stronger and stronger and a rule of a few handfuls of companies on a global basis. And there's a
world where the EU or other countries start to interfere and push back and the game is completely
different. But let me just make the point that every great bull market was accompanied by claims
that it was entirely different that due to the development of radio and the automobiles in
1999, the world was completely different.
Electricity, telephones, all of the good things were finally getting broadly distributed.
They'd been discovered earlier, but now they were being commercialized, and the giant AT&Ts were
taking shape and so on.
And the same in the tech bubble.
Times were different.
Tech was taking over the world.
The internet would change everything.
Drive away the dark clouds of ignorance, said Greenspan.
It's quite poetic. And it was important. They were both important. But in between, the market became
once again quite mundane and quite boring. And let me just talk about Amazon. Amazon went up
multiple times in 99. And Amazon is a terrific successful firm and one of the players now. But it went
down not a lot in 2000 and that bare market. It declined by 92%. I mean, just think about that.
A successful company, not disputing it, brilliantly managed, et cetera, et cetera, went up,
let's say 10 times in a real hurry and then declines 92% before rising from the dead again
and inheriting the world.
That is the nature of the beast.
If you go back in history, you find there was a huge bubble around the canal building
in Europe.
Then there was a huge, a huge bubble around railroads, both in the US and particularly in the UK
and Europe, where they built or planned to.
build, six, seven railroad systems between Manchester and Sheffield, you know, I mean, absolutely
loony turns. And of course it was huge. It changed the economy. It changed the world. But there was a
huge financial bubble and it broke. And it didn't wash away the railroads. It just washed away
the investors. The railroads were left. They changed the world. They allowed a great surge of
economic growth. But they bust. The internet. It's a real idea. It was serious. And it bust.
Amazon, brilliant company, and it bust.
Try owning a stock that goes down 92%.
And you'll know what I mean by bust.
So to have AI be serious, and it is serious, anyone can see that.
It's a very serious idea.
But if it doesn't have a glorious bubble up front and then bust and then regroup and be serious,
it will be the first such event in history.
It will probably happen.
Now, there's always the odd thing that is different in you.
And maybe this will be it.
But history says, that's the pattern.
Brilliant new idea does not mean the path is smooth.
Brilliant new idea typically means the more brilliant, the more real it is,
the more dollars get behind it, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the bust,
and then you dig it out and you make your serious progress.
It is not clear how many people will make any money in AI, is it?
And how do you sell chips to lots of people when, for a year or two anyway,
they're reeling back from the fact they've spent time.
funds of money and they've had no return on it. It's a very, very lively possibility that one day
in the next couple of years, there will come a day when it will not have done well at all and
be advised. So nowadays, Jeremy, you're much more focused on what you deem to be much bigger
issues, which is studying and investing in the climate and green energy space. So when I first
started learning about investing. I was taught about the power of compounding. So $1 today,
it gets invested. One day, it'll be worth $2, $5, $10 or more. From your perspective, what's the
danger or flaw in assuming compounded growth of the economy into the longer term future?
Just to start, again, the very long end, which no one is interested in, where mathematics
and reality rules the waves, you cannot have sustained compound growth on.
a finite planet. And one of the tests I run is just imagine you try to compound a growth rate of
population at 1% a year. It's done considerably more than that in my life. When I was born,
it was 2.2 billion. It's now 8.304, 3.6 times in my lifetime. Let's assume a more moderate
1%. But for a long period, the lifespan of the Egyptian empire, 3,000 years. It doesn't just
expand the population a lot. It expands by 7%.
7 trillion times. That's incredibly unintuitive, isn't it? A lousy 1% for 3,000 years is in simple,
non-compound interest, 3,0.1%. I mean, not 7 trillion times. You cannot compound. And that's what we're
doing. We're compounding the use of fossil fuels. We're compounding the use of fuels all the way up
the lithium, copper, cobalt that we use for greening the world. These are rare metals. They're 0.0.0.000.
0.02 to 0.006% of the Earth's crust. They're very scarce. We can't keep on growing like this.
In the last 10 years, we've produced as many chemicals as the previous 100. And before that,
there were no chemicals produced at all. You can't compound like this. You generate enormous waste,
enormous stress, you drive out nature, and in the end, you discover that nature is pretty
significant. The real experts, for example, are not sure if we can even survive as a system without
insects. And the biomass of insects is down somewhere between 50 and 75%, just a weight of all those
bugs that recycle the soil in the forest, that pollinate 70% of what we eat, of the species
that we eat. And to give you an example of how growth of this kind, compound growth is squeezing the
life out of our very agreeable planet. It's 20,000 years ago, you had basically a fraction of
1% were human beings in biomass of mammals and a few pet dogs. And that started to grow in terms
of humans compounding from a couple of million to eight plus billion and armored with giant
blocks of sheep and herds of cattle and dogs and cats. Do you know what they amount to today?
96% of all mammal life is humans and their pets, and 4% is all the wild animals, all the
elephants and deer and rabbits added together of 4%. If we continue to grow, the 4 becomes 2 becomes 1,
and we find ourselves engaged in a very interesting experiment, can we really make it without
the insects pulling their weight, without nature doing its thing? We're crushing nature. Plastics in the ocean,
Plastics in our brains, plastics in the bloodstream.
P-fasses that are never destroyed by nature are in the water, in the rain, in our systems, in unborn babies.
And they cause all manner of ailments, but the one that's most interesting to me is they interfere with fertility.
P-fasses interfere with fertility.
Plastic in the system in general interferes with fertility.
I think above all, pesticides interfere with fertility.
Pesticides consumed on fruit and vegetables by pregnant women are, I believe, the most dangerous
component that we deal with. Pesticides are designed to kill plants, they're designed to kill insects,
they're designed to kill fungus. This is not an accident. You know, plastics interfere with fertility,
an unfortunate accident, but they weren't designed to. But pesticides are designed to kill, for heaven's sake,
and we slather them on much increased quantities at least five or six times more than we did in, as recently,
as 1980, we slathered on the fruit and vegetables, and we recommend the pregnant women eat lots
of fruit and vegetables, and we wonder why bad things happen. And the population, for many reasons,
is going to bust. And no one, they begin to talk about it. The odd book is written. The odd book
doesn't empty planet, perfectly good book, doesn't mention toxicity. And toxicity is a game changer.
There are, you know, 50 good reasons, nothing to do with toxicity, where women are deciding not to have
children. They're expensive, they're time-consuming, very difficult to deal with, and the style these
days is to do it very intensively, very seriously, takes up your whole life, makes you exhausted,
interferes with your career, and women do not get a fair deal. Why would we be surprised that they
think they would rather be a full-term participant in the benefits of capitalism? There are many
reasons not to have children. But then in the future, rather than the past, we have toxicity. What does it do?
The sperm count in the developed world since Hunter Gatherers is down about 60%, not 8%, 15%, 60% decline.
And according to the experts who look at all the studies ever done, they say that the decline
is accelerating.
The decline rate in the 21st century is 2.5% a year, and the decline in the last century since World War II
was 1.5% a year.
So here we are, we're down 60%.
We're dropping at 2.5 percentage points from that level every year.
And the other day, 20 years ago, a few technical problems with giving birth.
But there was not a serious level of problem.
And today, the World Health guys are saying that 15% of young couples need help.
It's been an enormous increase and it's all in the last 15 or so years.
20 years from now, it's going to be a third or more of all young couples.
And if you just look at the statistics, it is going to make it very unlikely that even when you decide to have children,
when you've gotten over the 60 reasons not to have them.
And then when you try, you find that your ability to have children, your fecundity is also down.
And there is another component that no one talks about, and that is that chemicals are doing a job on our hormones and are interfering with our desire to have sex.
Every study you see, every age group, every country, there is less sexual activity.
So just think about this.
You're not that interested.
And there are cultural reasons also to be less interested.
And then finally, there are 60 reasons not to have children anyway.
And then when you finally get over all those hurdles, your ability has been interfered with by chemicals.
This is a fairly disastrous outlook.
I will guarantee you, almost 25% of all countries now have declining population.
Every developed country in the world has a declining cohort of babies except Israel.
And India is now below replacement.
So yes, we're growing, but we're growing because we have lots of old fogies like me who have to
be carried around and have disproportionate share of medical treatment and so on. We're an expensive
lot in general, and we are accumulating vast quantities of over 60s, over 80s that we never had before,
and we're going to have to pay for it with a much reduced cohort of 20-year-olds and 30. You know,
in Japan, who's 20, 30 years ahead of us, the cohort of 18-year-olds is not down 5%, not down 10%, it's down 50% from its peak.
50%. If we were down 50% in America, we would be freaking out. It changes everything. Japan has an
amazing social contract, an amazing culture. They can deal with things like this. Do not kid yourself.
I joke that my rule 21 in investing is never extrapolate from Japan. They are a completely
different, interesting, strange society seen through Western eyes. And they can do things.
And they can cope with things that we cannot cope with. Let's take a quick break. And here.
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All right.
Back to the show.
So you've stated that a large percentage of your wealth is invested in early stage venture capital,
things like presumably green energy, climate change.
And one of your previous comments that stuck out to me was that capitalism has produced
amazing things for society, but it can't even begin to spell altruism.
To help accelerate the transition, you've advocated for things like a carbon tax to encourage
the use of alternative energy sources.
So in light of what you've seen sort of in this venture arena, do you foresee just more intervention
outside from like government forces is going to be needed? Or are you seeing, you know,
seeing a lot of hope in terms of innovation and human ingenuity and whatnot?
Yeah, I see a lot of hope in terms of ingenuity. We're a pretty dopey species and very
inept at thinking about long-term problems. But my God, we're inventive. And if you go back 20 years,
I think every honest climate change person would have to admit that the progress in wind, the progress in solar, the progress in storage, particularly cheapest, creepers.
That will soon be down to 5% of the cost of 20 years ago.
Far more profound progress than anyone ever guessed.
Electric vehicles.
Plug-in vehicles in China today approach 50% of total.
And they're ingenious dripping in functions and they make 90% of the electric buses in the world.
and they have over 90% now of their buses are electric.
I know the progress has been sensational and far broader than I mentioned.
The damage has been sensational as well.
We phrased this as the race of our lives because both sides are racing.
I mean, we produced more in the last three years,
more increments of particles of CO2,
which are outrageously effective at trapping heat.
We produced more in the last three years
than any three years in American history.
We have not even started to tip the increase of CO2 yet.
I think we will.
I think in 20 years from now, the annual output will be down.
I think China, Europe, and the US will all peak and be declining.
The problem is, and why it's a race, so we don't have a lot of time.
We're doing so much damage.
And you can see it.
Anyone who doesn't suffer from a strong belief of political principles gets in the way of looking at data
can see that the weather is going to hell, right?
We have far more floods, which was pretty.
predictable at least 30, 40 years ago, hotter air will carry and carries 5% more water vapor than it
used to. So you will get more serious downforce, and we are seeing it everywhere. But the temperature
is going up, so it will dry out the countryside quicker, and you will have more droughts,
and you will have more forest fires. And if you look at the billion dollar accident, it's a chart that
goes from low on the left of the chart to way high on the right of the chart. Steady dramatic increases
in billion-dollar-plus weather accidents.
In a real sense, they're not accidents.
They're part of the deal that we have going on here.
You create particles of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide.
You trap the heat.
And we're trapping it at the rate of an old Hiroshima nuclear bomb every few seconds.
That is the incremental heat trapped equivalent every few seconds.
I mean, it is absolutely shocking.
And you think, think of all the energy you get from burning fossil fuels.
That isn't the energy that gets trapped.
Because of the fact that the process is quite different, it generates CO2 by horrible accident.
CO2 is an incredible heat trapper.
If it wasn't, by the way, we'd be living on a frozen planet at minus 25 degrees centigrade.
So thank God, CO2 is an efficient trapper of heat.
But when you start increasing that, you don't go up by the energy that you just released.
You go up way over 10 times that.
CO2 is such an efficient trapper that you get one calorie of energy.
but the trapped heat goes up by way over 10 times.
So we are roasting ourselves and better take it seriously very fast.
But is there a way out of this?
I think if everybody takes it seriously, we can do it.
The trouble with capitalism, I think basically capitalism does everything,
almost everything better than any other system.
I would be happy to leave 99% of everything to capitalism.
Profit motive turns everybody on.
As I was quoted as saying, it can't spell the word altruism.
It profit maximizes.
It can't deal with tragedies of the commons.
Everybody gains profit by pumping out CO2 into the air and not being charged for it,
by polluting and not being charged for it.
And so they do it.
Milton Friedman said the moral imperative, basically, of a capitalist enterprise,
is to maximize its profit.
Get away, if it's legal, do it.
And it's legal to pollute the world and not be charged for it.
So they do it.
You cannot expect a corporation.
to volunteer to lower its profits just in order to save Homo sapiens in the long run.
It's not what they do.
And so they don't.
You can hardly find any corporation that has ever volunteered to give up a significant
chunk of profits in the interest of society.
It's an unreasonable expectation given where capitalism is today.
It simply has no machinery to address climate change, no machinery yet to adjust toxicity.
If we don't clean up toxic chemicals out of the system in the next few generations, we definitely cease to exist.
So we have got to produce a way of handling these tragedies of the commons.
And the only way to do that is by regulation.
Sorry, guys, capitalism is wonderful.
Libertarians are wonderful.
But there's no machinery to save our bacon.
If we do not address problems of the commons, climate and toxicity, we are toast.
And we better do it fairly quickly.
I don't see it as philanthropy, by the way. I've put up 90% of my net worth and I've committed another 5%. I see it as sensible defense of a wonderful planet for my children and grandchildren, et cetera, and everyone else, as far as I'm concerned, gets a free load. But other people better help because we are way collectively underfunded and under researching. And we can do this. We are magnificent at doing it when we have the researchers and the money. But we are absolutely.
outgunned by the massive spending of the capitalist system. They are still generating more fossil
fuel, more pollution, and more chemicals than they did the year before. And we better stop it in
the next 10 or 20 years or we're out of business. One of the difficulties that crosses my mind
with respect to the green energy transition is making some of these sources of energy
economically viable relative to the traditional sources. But you help shed light for me.
in terms of decarbonization is coming and these costs are dropping. But what also comes to mind is
if the cost of wind, the cost of solar is just constantly dropping, you'd think that, you know,
all these players are just going to be lowering prices and there's going to be little to no margin
left for a lot of these companies. So how do you see sort of the profit incentive in a lot of this
space? Well, I mean, the good news, bad news is it's an incredibly competitive business. By the way,
that's how capitalism is meant to work. You're meant to compete and the ones,
to do it cheaper, make some money, and the ones who are a bit sloppy, don't make any money.
And it's working. And the progress of wind and solar just spectacular.
Solar in particular is a couple of percent of what it was 30 years ago in cost.
And it will get better.
There are endless research improvements in the works now for further progress in the efficiency
of the panel and the cost of the panel, the same to a lesser degree with wind.
But there's also other areas like geothermal.
If we could take the technology of fracking where we drill 200,000 wells in the U.S.
And produce the most amazing impressive ingenuity, engineering tricks.
Just bear in mind, it's solid rock fracking.
You're squeezing oil out of solid rock and you're getting it out at a price you can afford.
That is amazing.
If we could take that ingenuity and persistence and engineering competence and move it to geothermal,
It is quite likely, I think, 50-50 anyway, to come back in 30, 40 years, you will be able to drill
fairly deep wells and tap into the more or less infinite supply of heat below the crust.
And that will be a game changer because that, unlike the sun and the wind, which needs storage,
is permanent.
It's all 24 hours.
But wind and solar is going to get so cheap and storage is going to get so cheap that we may not
need these other things.
But fusion also. There are 40 new firms, second generation fusion. Again, it seems like a pretty
decent chance eventually in a few decades, maybe even as little as a couple. We will have early
generation fusion. I worry that it will never be competitive because of huge capital costs,
but it's a wonderful backup and we may need it and it may be a pleasant surprise. And there
maybe other energy forms will come along to help us. We will not be short of cheap green energy,
by the way, that will not be what brings us to our knees. I think toxicity is a much bigger problem,
and I think decarbonizing heavy industry is a much bigger problem than cheap green energy.
Well, Jeremy, I want to be mindful of your time. Is there anything else we should touch on before
I give you a final handoff to any resources you'd like to share?
I could say that why the population bust is such a dangerous element is that if it falls too fast,
It will shock the economic system, the whole structure, and we will feel poor.
The GDP will not be growing like it used to.
We will feel too poor to have the resources to solve for climate change, etc., and detoxifying
completely the system.
What I hope for is that over, say, five or six generations, the population will decline
kind of a Goldilocks rate at about 1.5 fertility rate, 2.1 is replacement, for five generations
and then move back up to 2.1, so you have a stable system in perpetuity.
And we have six generations to detoxify the planet.
And we can do that.
We can do it faster, but we tend to move very slowly in things like this.
And there's a very well-organized resistance.
Chemical producers who have never met a chemical like DDT that they didn't love and was good
for us and we should be eating for breakfast.
They have never volunteered to take chemicals off the market because they found that they were
poisonous.
No, they find that they're poisonous and they keep quiet about it.
So DuPont and Triple M know that Pfasas are deadly, and they've been cranking them out for decades.
I mean, they might as well be walking down the high street and shooting you with machine guns, just like the tobacco companies.
They knew also they were giving us cancer.
No one ever went to jail in the tobacco company, even though they inflicted millions of deaths on the general public, knowingly in the name of making profit.
And the chemical companies and oil companies will do exactly the same.
That's how capitalism works.
And somehow we, the system, have to decode that and live with it and make it work.
And it will not be easy.
I think it's about 50-50.
I think it's a weird race in which we have these incredible talents and these incredible deficiencies
and a weird system that does not generate anywhere near logical, rational behavior.
I tell you one thing I've missed.
Everyone likes to kick China.
And, of course, being a fairly single-minded environmentalist, I have to say, do.
They have got a death grip on everything to do with greening the planet.
You may know that they produce 80% of the solar panels.
They produce 90% of the material that goes into the solar panels.
They produce way over 50% of all the refined lithium and cobalt
that goes into greening batteries and so on.
And they produce more EVs than the rest of the world added together now.
Last year, they put in more solar than the US had ever put in cumulatively.
I mean, just think about that. It's almost inconceivable. And if you want to get really worried, in 2003, China wasn't 1% of the peer-reviewed articles of leading journals and citations and patents. Last year and the year before, they overtook the US. The US back in 2003 was like 40% plus of all the world's peer-reviewed articles, and now China is slightly ahead. How is that possible in 20 years to go from nothing in peer-reviewed serious science?
to being the world leader. That is scary. They produce many more patents than the U.S. or the EU
added together. They are moving at the rate of warp speed, and they're dominating all the green
new technologies, and we better put our best foot forward. Well, Jeremy, I myself, no, I certainly
appreciate you joining me on the show here. And one of the things that I sort of took away and
kind of preparing for this interview, as you mentioned, you like to see yourself as a realist,
somebody that looks at the world the way it is and not the way that you'd like it to be.
And I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts with the audience and really putting yourself
out there with regard to many of these issues that are very pressing to the world today.
I want to give you a chance to share any resources or handoff to your firm GMO
and anything else you'd like to share or point the audience towards.
In terms of GMO, I draw your attention to quality where exchange trade and fund,
ETF, we have a very successful product. We've been studying quality for 30 years at GMO, actually
45 years now I think about it. And we've taken it more seriously than most people. I think we
understand it better. And quality is a very interesting characteristic. You know, a AAA bond
delivers a percent less than a more junky bond. The AAA stock does not. A AAA stock is actually
a long history of outperforming. It's a free good. It's an aberration, one of many, many
aberrations in the market, the market is not efficient. Quality stocks tend to be, I think,
considered a little boring. When you're in a bull market, you want something a little sexy,
and that may be the reason. But in any case, going back into time immemorial the last hundred
years, quality stocks have been a free good. They have outperformed by somewhere between a half
percent and a percent a year for being the AAA bond equivalent. I mean, how good is that? And that
is what we offer. We'll close it out there, Jeremy. Thank you again so much. It's really
in honor having the opportunity. Yeah, thank you. It's a pleasure. And I consider it my job.
All right, everybody, thanks so much for tuning in to today's episode with legendary investor,
Jeremy Grantham. If you're interested in collaborating with TIP hosts and other vetted members of
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