TheCenterLane.com

© 2008 – 2024 John T. Burke, Jr.

More Great Thoughts from Jeremy Grantham

Comments Off on More Great Thoughts from Jeremy Grantham

I always look forward to Jeremy Grantham’s Quarterly Letter.  Grantham is the Co-founder and Chief Investment Strategist of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), an investment management firm, entrusted to oversee approximately $97 billion in client assets.

Unlike many asset managers, Jeremy Grantham has a social conscience.  As a result, during the past few years we have seen him direct some sharp criticism at President Obama, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and – of course – Goldman Sachs.  Grantham fell behind schedule when his Third Quarter 2011 Letter was delayed by over a month.  As a result, Grantham’s Fourth Quarter 2011 Letter was just released a few days ago.  At 15 pages, it earned the title “The Longest Quarterly Letter Ever”.  As usual, Grantham has provided us with some great investment insights – along with some pointed criticism of our ignorant legislators and mercenary corporate managers.  What follows are some selected passages.  Be sure to read the entire letter here (when you have time).

To leave it to capitalism to get us out of this fix by maximizing its short-term profits is dangerously naïve and misses the point: capitalism and corporations have absolutely no mechanism for dealing with these problems, and seen through a corporate discount rate lens, our grandchildren really do have no value.

To move from the problem of long time horizons to the short-term common good, it is quickly apparent that capitalism in general has no sense of ethics or conscience.  Whatever the Supreme Court may think, it is not a person.  Why would a company give up a penny for the common good if it is not required to by enforced regulation or unless it looked like that penny might be returned with profit in the future because having a good image might be good for business?  Ethical CEOs can drag a company along for a while, but this is an undependable and temporary fix.  Ethical humans can also impose their will on corporations singly or en masse by withholding purchases or bestowing them, and companies can anticipate this and even influence it through clever brand advertising, “clean coal” being my favorite.  But that is quite different from corporate altruism. Thus, we can roast our planet and firms may offer marvelous and profitable energy-saving equipment, but it will be for profit today, not planet saving tomorrow.

It gets worse, for what capitalism has always had is money with which to try to buy influence.  Today’s version of U.S. capitalism has died and gone to heaven on this issue. A company is now free to spend money to influence political outcomes and need tell no one, least of all its own shareholders, the technical owners.  So, rich industries can exert so much political influence that they now have a dangerous degree of influence over Congress.  And the issues they most influence are precisely the ones that matter most, the ones that are most important to society’s long-term well-being, indeed its very existence.  Thus, taking huge benefits from Nature and damaging it in return is completely free and all attempts at government control are fought with costly lobbying and advertising.  And one of the first victims in this campaign has been the truth.  If scientific evidence suggests costs and limits be imposed on industry to protect the long-term environment, then science will be opposed by clever disinformation.

*   *   *

Capitalism certainly acts as if it believes that rapid growth in physical wealth can go on forever.  It appears to be hooked on high growth and avoids any suggestion that it might be slowed down by limits.  Thus, it exhibits horror at the thought (and occasional reality) of declining population when in fact such a decline is an absolute necessity in order for us to end up gracefully, rather than painfully, at a fully sustainable world economy.  Similarly with natural resources, capitalism wants to eat into these precious, limited resources at an accelerating rate with the subtext that everyone on the planet has the right to live like the wasteful polluting developed countries do today.  You don’t have to be a PhD mathematician to work out that if the average Chinese and Indian were to catch up with (the theoretically moving target of) the average American, then our planet’s goose is cooked, along with most other things.  Indeed, scientists calculate that if they caught up, we would need at least three planets to be fully sustainable.  But few listen to scientists these days.  So, do you know how many economic theories treat resources as if they are finite?  Well, the researchers at the O.E.C.D say “none” – that no such theory exists.  Economic theory either ignores this little problem or assumes you reach out and take the needed resources given the normal workings of supply and demand and you can do it indefinitely.  This is a lack of common sense on a par with “rational expectations,” that elegant theory that encouraged the ludicrous faith in deregulation and the wisdom of free markets, which brought us our recent financial fiascos.  But this failure in economic theory – ignoring natural limits – risks far more dangerous outcomes than temporary financial crashes.

*   *   *

As described above, the current U.S. capitalist system appears to contain some potentially fatal flaws.  Therefore, we should ask what it would take for our system to evolve in time to save our bacon.  Clearly, a better balance with regulations would be a help. This requires reasonably enlightened regulations, which are unlikely to be produced until big money’s influence in Congress, and particularly in elections, decreases.  This would necessitate legal changes all the way up to the Supreme Court.  It’s a long haul, but a handful of other democratic countries in northern Europe have been successful, and with the stakes so high we have little alternative but to change our ways.

*   *   *

Capitalism, by ignoring the finite nature of resources and by neglecting the long-term well-being of the planet and its potentially crucial biodiversity, threatens our existence.  Fifty and one-hundred-year horizons are important despite the “tyranny of the discount rate,” and grandchildren do have value. My conclusion is that capitalism does admittedly do a thousand things better than other systems:  it only currently fails in two or three.  Unfortunately for us all, even a single one of these failings may bring capitalism down and us with it.

Keep in mind that the foregoing passages were just from Part II of the Quarterly Letter.  Part III is focused on “Investment Observations for the New Year”.  Be sure to check it out – it’s not as bearish as you might expect.  Enjoy!



 

Some Sad News

Comments Off on Some Sad News

From Steve Waldman’s Interfluidity website on January 25:

Maxine Udall, “girl economist”, has been one of my favorite bloggers, a person who combines the power of economic thinking with a deep appreciation for moral and social concerns, all expressed in a very human, very charming, voice.

Today we learn that her name in real life was Alison Snow Jones, and that she is with us no more.  Wow.  This is an awful loss.

I don’t really know what to say.  But Maxine Udall had plenty to say, so I’ll just excerpt.

David Pinney and Meredith Frost have been kind enough to keep the Maxine Udall website going, with this, their expressed wish, in mind:

Please read, link to, and mine Dr. Jones’s writing for information, insight and inspiration.  Her deepest hope was to challenge people to think in new ways about our society and how we live, and to bring her unique viewpoint to as many people as possible.

Accordingly, I have added the Maxine Udall Girl Economist site to my blogroll and I encourage you to click on that link to read some of her essays.  I expect that we will find some interesting comments posted there in the weeks and months ahead.  Dr. Jones had some great thoughts and I would like to contribute to the effort toward keeping those thoughts alive in cyberspace and in the minds of others for as long as possible.

Steve Waldman provided some great excerpts from a few of the essays by Dr. Jones here.

What follows is a passage from a piece she wrote last year, lamenting our ongoing pathetic state of affairs and beyond that – the fact that the financial industry became a “brain drain” –  pulling talented people away from professions which could have allowed those individuals to make more significant contributions to society:

I remain committed to capitalism:  free markets when they function well, regulated markets when they don’t.   The above are simply additional arguments for reining in and regulating casino-like behavior and casino-like rewards in any market, not just capital markets.  In the long run, we will all be dead, but as long as someone will be alive, they deserve a better world and a better life than one gets in a casino where the odds are disproportionately in favor of the house and the house is an unholy combination of corporate power and wealth backed by government laissez faire and largesse.

The following statement by Steve Waldman concerning the loss of Dr. Jones highlights the feelings shared by many of us:

I scan and read so many blog posts every day, even great writing often fades into the background.  Going through the last few months of her work makes me terribly sad that this is a person I will never meet.


wordpress visitor