Jeremy Grantahm: Still Holding Back

By Prieur du Plessis, on October 14th, 2008 posted in: Investment, Markets, Money One comment so far

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In a recent interview with Barron’s, Jeremy Grantham cautioned that the biggest mistake might be buying too soon. He co-founded Boston-based GMO, an investment house overseeing $120 billion in assets, in 1977.

In July this year Grantham said: “Ironically for a ‘perma bear’, I underestimated in almost every way how badly economic and financial fundamentals would turn out. Events must now be disturbing to everyone, and I for one am officially scared!” In terms of strategy, he summarized his view with what he believes should be investors’ motto: “Don’t be brave, run away. Live to fight another day.”

Although his warnings go back a number of years, Grantham was eventually right. It was therefore with keen interest that I read in Barron’s his latest views on the fallout from the financial crisis and what investment opportunities he sees.

Barron’s: How much will the recent $700 billion bailout plan approved by Congress help stabilize the economy and the financial markets?

Grantham: It certainly doesn’t hurt. It is an amazingly complicated situation. But I do believe we have passed the point where we have to worry about moral hazard. When Bear Stearns was in trouble, I used to worry about moral hazard.

What is your sense of how this crisis has been handled by those in charge?
It’s been a haphazard response, and the next time something happens, you can’t be sure what will happen. In one deal they protect the bonds, while in the next deal the bonds go. Then in the next deal they protect the foreign bonds but not the domestic bonds. My guess is that people will be nervous that they will be at the bad end of one of the tough deals, rather than one of the more gentle deals.

Everyone is shaking in their boots. The awareness of risk has come back with a terrifying surge, and it is not going to go away too quickly.

With the Fed and other central banks lowering rates last week, are you worried about inflation?
My view is, “Forget inflation, guys.” This is serious, the real McCoy, and you don’t have to worry about little things like inflation. Global growth will slow down, commodities will be weaker for a while, and inflation is a thing of the past. Now we are talking about getting the financial machinery to work and just keeping [gross domestic product] grinding along.

What was at the core of what got the financial system into this crisis?
It was the belief by a lot of people who counted that financial bubbles did not have to addressed. The thinking was that …you could step in and, by scattering a bit of money around, ease the downside consequences. Therefore, you could let the tech bubble run amok and wait for it to burst and step in. And you could let the housing bubble run amok and step in.

At the center of this crisis was a bubble in risk-taking. The risk premiums dropped off the cosmic scale, the lowest ever recorded. On our seven-year forecast data, we reckoned that between June of ’06 and June of ’07, people were actually paying for the privilege of taking risk. Our constant theme for the last three years was avoid risk, avoid risk, avoid risk.

How much further do we have to go to get through this downturn?
Great bubbles like the one in 2000 take a long time to wash through the system, and you shouldn’t really expect a low much before 2010. The fair value on the [Standard & Poor's 500 index] is about 1025 [versus 910 late last week].

This was not only a monetary event, but it coincided with the first truly global bubble in all assets. You had inflated housing in almost every country in the world, except for Japan and Germany. You had overpriced stocks in every country in the world. And you had too much money and too-low interest rates. I was confident about very little, but I was confident that this would be different from anything we had seen before, and potentially more dangerous. It should have been treated with more care.

Is this crisis playing out the way you thought it would?
No. I threw in the towel three months ago, and wrote a quarterly letter saying I thought I was the bear around this joint.

But this is much worse than I thought. All the fundamentals are turning out worse than I thought they would. All the competencies of the senior people at the Fed, Treasury and [firms like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers] have turned out to be much less than I had expected; that’s very disappointing.

And, therefore, how could one’s confidence that the senior people would get us through the storm be very high? Prior to three months ago, we were investing in emerging-market equities. Then we battened down the hatches, and I changed my view from avoid all risk except emerging markets to avoid all risk, period.

The terrible thing – after all this pain – is that the U.S. equity market is not even cheap. You would imagine that, given the amount of panic, that it would be. But it started from such a high level in 2000 that it still has not yet worked its way down to trend, although it is getting close. But the really bad news is that great bubbles in history always overcorrected. So although the fair value of the S&P today may be about 1025, typically bubbles overcorrect by quite a bit, possibly by 20%. That is very discouraging.

What about equities outside the U.S.?
Things are getting cheaper. We score the EAFE [the Europe, Australasia and Far East Index] as absolutely cheap, and it’s offering a 7% real annual return over seven years. Emerging-market equities are a bit cheaper, and we see a 9.5% annual real return over the same period.

The problem, though, is that we have so much downside momentum, so many financial problems and so many interlocking relationships, that it is hard to imagine this crisis subsiding because stock prices are digging in their heels and approaching fair value.

What happens to hedge funds in the wake of this crisis?
A year ago, I said that half of all hedge funds would go out of business in five years, and I would certainly stand by that today. Unfortunately, like a lot of my dire projections, that may turn out to be conservative.

I also said that at least one major bank will fail. I got a lot of grief for that, and now it looks like I could have said at least a dozen major banks will fail.

As for the broad, typical opinion that we would muddle through this crisis, it just shows you what a dangerous optimistic bias the advisory business has built into it.

Do you think we will learn anything from all of this turmoil?
We will learn an enormous amount in a very short time, quite a bit in the medium term and absolutely nothing in the long term. That would be the historical precedent.

Let’s talk about your asset allocations
In a nutshell, we are as conservative as we can possibly get. One bet that has been very successful for us, touch wood, has been long high-quality, blue-chip stocks, particularly in the U.S., and short risky companies. We have been screaming against risk-taking for a long time, and in recent weeks, it has paid off enormously.

What about looking ahead in terms of asset allocation?
Going forward, you can think about slowly moving back into the cheapest pockets of global equities. So the next move that we make will be back to moderate neutral in emerging-market equities and small-cap international value. I can’t say we are going to be in a great hurry, but that will be our next move. We had finished selling almost everything except emerging markets two years ago. We finished selling emerging-market equities three months ago.

But the next move will be buying, and we are encouraged that there are a few pockets that are cheap on an absolute basis. We are not encouraged that they will rally immediately. But we will be looking to buy the cheap pockets of global equities as our next move some time in the next several months.

Why emerging markets and small-cap international value?
Just value and because they have been hit the most. Emerging equities are down almost 50% since late last year, and some of small-cap international is down more than 40%. That big a drop has this wonderful effect of making these categories look cheap pretty fast. You can buy, but it doesn’t mean it is their low, and I strongly suspect it is not.

The great trap is to buy too soon and, in the big move, to sell too soon. I’ve been saying since ’98-’99 that my next major-league error will be buying too soon – but we will not buy quite yet. But when we do, I suspect it will be too soon again.

What do you see ahead for commodities?
Commodities have a great long-term future, now that the long-term trend has shifted from falling commodity prices to rising commodity prices. Having said that, the next couple of years will be quite different. We are in a global slowdown, which I think will be worse than expected even today, and it will be longer than expected – so this is not a healthy environment for commodities. Over a shorter horizon, I would be getting out of the way of commodities or I would be short commodities. I’m personally short oil; the firm is short copper.

What about some other trades?
I’m speaking for the asset-allocation unit at the firm. We have been substantially long the safe-haven currencies. We have been very long the yen and somewhat long the Swiss franc and short sterling, which is one of our favorite bets. We have been short the euro for three months, and slightly long the U.S. dollar. One of the paradoxes is, if the world is worse than people expect, the U.S. dollar will outperform.

Why are you shorting the euro?
It just ran too far. It went from 85 cents on the U.S. dollar to $1.60; it more or less doubled, which I don’t think reflects reality. But the biggest lay-up of any idea over the last three or six months was shorting the pound.

The U.K. housing market was dreadfully overpriced. I felt nearly certain that the U.K. housing market would come back to a more normal multiple of family income, which is a very big decline of 40% if you did it in a hurry – or you can sit back for many years and wait for income to catch up. But you should really count on that market coming down over a couple of years painfully.

Do you have any closing thoughts about how we got into this financial state?
I ask myself, “Why is it that several dozen people saw this crisis coming for years?” I described it as being like watching a train wreck in very slow motion. It seemed so inevitable and so merciless, and yet the bosses of Merrill Lynch and Citi and even [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson and [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke – none of them seemed to see it coming.

I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained – but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.

So it’s more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored.

If you look at the people who have been screaming about impending doom, and you added all of those several dozen people together, I don’t suppose that collectively they could run a single firm without dragging it into bankruptcy in two weeks. They are just a different kind of person.

So we kept putting organization people – people who can influence and persuade and cajole – into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don’t have those skills.

Where do you see all of this going?
I want to emphasize how little I understand all of the intricate workings of the global financial system. I hope that someone else gets it, because I don’t. And I have no idea, really, how this will work out. I certainly wish it hadn’t happened. It is just so intricate that all I can conclude, by instinct and by reading the history books, is that it will be longer, harder and more complicated than we expect.

Source: Lawrence C Strauss, Barron’s, October 13, 2008.

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