The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 81 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Grantham: The AI bubble will break, led down by Nvidia
“This is exactly where you'd expect the bubble to break, and you would expect, other things being even, that it will be let down by NVIDIA, followed closely by the other giants.”
Grantham: The market bubble will likely break in weeks or months
“So I think this is an indicator, not a certainty, but a strong possibility that we are quite close to the bubble breaking in terms of psychology. Perhaps a matter of weeks or months, not years.”
Grantham: Goldman and JPMorgan will never tell clients to exit overpriced markets
“You will never hit a Goldman Sachs or a JP Morgan Tell you to get out of the market because it's ludicrously overpriced. Everybody knows today it's ludicrously overpriced, but no one can tell you, and they never will.”
Grantham: US housing never bubbled nationwide until Greenspan and Bernanke
“The American housing market had famously bubbled in Chicago and bust in California, bubbled in Florida, etc. Never altogether until Greenspan and Bernanke.”
Grantham: Endowment boards struggle to manage giant egos of wealthy PE and VC donors
“Many committees are a nearly impossible task where, particularly in the endowment business, colleges, because rich graduates who've made big donations, Would love to sit on the board. They are treated with kid gloves because they're wonderfully good at making …”
Grantham: South Korea Will Cease Being a Viable State Within 50 Years
“That South Korea cannot be a viable political entity in as little as 4050 years. Cannot.”
Grantham: Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers Are Unaccountable 'Teflon Men'
“My biggest investment peeve is that the Greenspans and the Larry Summers, they get away with murder. I call them the Teflon men. I was heartbroken when they kept getting reappointed by new presidents that I had higher hopes for, even as they had just presided …”
Grantham: Capitalism Must Change or Humanity Ceases as Successful Species
“Capitalism will either change, or we will cease to exist as a successful species.”
Grantham: African migration to Europe will be society's primary political risk
“So I think it will be stress on those areas, and immigration, and the pressure on Europe of millions of Africans attempting to migrate will be the main political risk that we face, and a real threat to the well-being of society.”
Grantham: Diversified venture capital has stock-market-level risk with higher returns
“Venture capital, not surprisingly, has a higher return than the stock market because of the riskiness of each individual unit. But if you have a diversified portfolio, you have no more risk than the stock market, but you have a higher return.”
Grantham: Investors should own as few U.S. equities as possible
“I do recommend owning as few US equities as you can face.”
Grantham: Moderate inflation supports faster growth and better worker treatment
“A moderate amount of inflation is completely compatible with a healthy economy, faster growth rates, and better treatment of the workers who have been sadly neglected in the US in particular.”
Grantham: Asset managers get fired in bull markets, not bear markets
“People think you get fired for underperforming in bear markets, which is nonsense. In a serious bear market, the client becomes catatonic.”
Grantham: Big asset managers cannot commercially survive fighting major bull markets
“If you're a big company, you can't fight a major bull market. It's ridiculous. It's terrible business. You have to roll with the punch.”
Grantham: Every Two-Sigma Asset Bubble Historically Reverted to Pre-Bubble Trends
“In major countries, there was no exception to the principle that an overpriced market at two sigma, which is just a statistical measure. If you look at the price, you look at the breakout on the upside. If it's two sigma, there is no exception to the rule that…”
Grantham: Navigating major bubbles is all that matters in long-term investing
“The only things that matter in life in investing are the founding, forming, and breaking of the great bubbles. That determines everything. If you can sidestep half of the pain, that will make all the difference in the world.”
Grantham: Investors should own non-US and emerging value stocks
“For a long time now, you should be owning non-US stocks, developed value stocks, and emerging country value stocks.”
Grantham: The US stock market is completely overpriced
“The US is simply too high priced from top to toe.”
Grantham: Super-Bubbles End When Speculative Market Leaders Dramatically Underperform
“I developed a singular rule that only has occurred four times in U.S. History. The stocks that have been leading the charge up 70% in 1928, the meme stocks in twenty-twenty, up huge amounts. When they start to underperform dramatically, the market, as the bull…”
Grantham: AI rally aborted the full crushing of the 2022 super-bubble
“The invasion of chat and AI ruined my perfectly good bear market. I still got a bear market. It was way over 20% decline, but it wasn't the crushing of a super bubble that would have happened. Without the great investment associated, the capex associated with …”
Grantham: AI CapEx is larger than any peacetime program in history
“AI Moving at warp speed, involving a greater CapEx program than has ever happened before outside of war.”
Grantham: Future markets might tax stocks to fund human price discovery
“In the end, you have to have some price work. You have to find a way of paying a few thousand good analysts to help price the equities, and I don't know how they will work it out. It's over my pay grade, but one day in the distant future, there might be a very…”
Grantham: Private equity and venture capital winners tend to stay winners
“Brilliant private equity and venture capital, and they are so much stickier than general money management. They don't turn over as fast in private equity and venture capital. The winners tend to stay winners.”
Grantham: Green Venture Capital Faces Two to Three More Bad Years
“And a lot more will fail, probably, given the level of help from the administration. I would think we're good for at least another two or three bad years.”
Grantham: Climate Denial Is Predominantly an American Phenomenon
“You don't find climate deniers around the world. You find a few in England, all extreme right-wing libertarians, and you find a small army in the US, but that's it. This is an American thing, climate denial.”
Grantham: Greenspan, Summers, and Levitt Blocked CFTC Subprime Regulation
“Greenspan and Summers and Levitt of the SEC waged war against the CFTC doing its job of regulating subprime instruments. They each, in turn, called up Brooksley Bourne, who was the boss, a lady of iron nerve and principle. They harangued her, saying, what are …”
Grantham: Global warming will reach 3.0 to 3.5 degrees Celsius
“The truth is we are not going to contain the climate warming of one and a half degrees or two degrees, that we are struggling to determine where in the zone over three degrees centigrade we'll end up. My guess is between three and three and a half degrees cent…”
Grantham: Financial markets are in a unique bubble unlike any other
“I do think we're in a bubble, but I also think it's unlike any other bubble.”
Grantham: PEs are in the top 5% while economy is bottom 5%
“We're in the highest five percent of PEs. And we're in the lowest five percent of economic conditions today. So there's never been anything like that in history.”
Grantham: Timing bubble peaks requires tracking speculative behavior, not valuation
“If you're trying to time the breaking of a bubble, the value is not that important. All of them are overpriced, and whether they're overpriced at 25 times earnings or 35 times earnings or in Japan at 65 times earnings, it's very difficult to work out in any so…”
Grantham: Electric vehicles, wind, and solar will overwhelm fossil fuels
“And the green VC part of it, which is springing out of the woodwork, is going to have a very high top line growth rate. Of course, electric cars are going to pound to death The growth rate of gasoline cars. Of course, wind and solar is going to overwhelm gas e…”
Grantham: China has 300,000 electric buses while the U.S. has 400
“They have 300,000 electric buses, and the U.S. Has 400.”
Grantham: Society will achieve an enormous green transition within 15 years
“You will come back in 10 or 15 years, and you will see that we have made an enormous transition to a green economy. We will win technologically.”
Grantham: Markets will see a major reversal favoring value over growth
“We may not snap back the 120% I would have calculated 20 years ago, but we are going to have a very big reversal in favor of value stocks sooner or later. I think we can be pretty safe about that.”
Grantham: Ten-year theses are not sufficient to justify short sales
“Ten-year arguments are not enough to justify short sales.”
Grantham: Developed markets face 1% to 1.25% GDP growth without green spending
“Without that, we continue on the flight path we've been on, I think one percent, maybe one and a quarter, is the kind of growth rate In GDP per capita that we're looking at for the next 20 years.”
Grantham: Foundation targets 70% allocation to early-stage venture capital
“And in our case, we can own early stage, and we are over 60%. We target 70%, early stage VC. And of that, we target up to a half in the green variety”
Grantham: Green VC will significantly outperform broader venture capital
“Because I think the top line opportunities It will be way over average even in the BC universe for a long time.”
Grantham: Corporate interest coverage is well above historical averages
“When you look at interest rate coverage, you find that the entire corporate system is in pretty darn good shape, well above average.”
Grantham: 3% to 5% inflation will compress PEs without hurting economy
“The economy is very, very durable in the face of Anything up to intermediate inflation levels, three, four, five percent. It won't affect the economy, but it will knock down price earnings ratios.”
Grantham: Management consulting work is typically very superficial
“The difference between what we thought we knew, which were many layers of the business, and what they knew, which was, to us, extremely superficial, let me know by the first week that consulting was like that, that it was a quick once-over, and typically very …”
Grantham: Great market bubbles require genuinely transformative ideas
“If you look back in history, what you find is that the great bubbles are associated with great investment ideas that get overdone. It has to be serious. And ideally, it has to be obviously serious.”
Grantham: Complex organizations almost always miss major turning points
“Complex organizations always get it wrong at major turning points, or almost always.”
Grantham: Foundation beat Harvard, Yale, Princeton over 10 years in Cambridge data
“Three years ago, before the current unpleasantness and the venture capital green business, we were number zero on the Cambridge Associates database, which is their code for number one. On a ten-year basis, we were beating Harvard and Yale and Princeton with ou…”
Grantham: Well-selected venture capital delivers the best long-term return
“The best return in the long run is probably well-selected venture capital. It should be, in theory. It appears to be in real life.”
Grantham: U.S. debt multiplied since Greenspan while economic growth slowed
“We entered an era with Greenspan of a fairly decent kink in the cumulative debt curve. It had been drifting up very slowly, and then it started to rise very rapidly since his era. What you notice is that despite the fact that the debt ratio Per unit of GDP has…”