Jeremy Grantham: Playing with fire (a possible race to the old highs)

It's spring, and this spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of speculation. The Fed's promises look good and, as long as you're not a small business, you can borrow to invest or speculate at no cost.

The following is an excerpt from the quarterly newsletter of Jeremy Grantham, Chairman of the Board of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo LLC. To read the full newsletter, please click here.

It’s spring, and this spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of speculation. The Fed’s promises look good and, as long as you’re not a small business, you can borrow to invest or speculate at no cost. The market has had a near record rally, sprinting far past our estimated fair value of 875 for the S&P 500. Bernanke is, in fact, begging us to speculate, and is being mean only to conservative investors like pensioners who cannot make a penny on their cash.

Collectively, we forego hundreds of billions of potential interest, but at least we can feel noble because we are helping to restore the financial health of the banks and bankers, who under these conditions could not fail to make a fortune even if brain dead. We are also lucky to have a tiny fraction of our foregone interest returned by the banks as loan repayments with “profi t.” Some profit!

Oh, for the good old days when we could just settle for a normal market-clearing rate of interest. But that, I suppose, would be wicked capitalism, and we had better get used to bank- and speculator-benefiting socialism. The massive bailout program stopped the meltdown of the financial system and engineered at least a temporary economic recovery. We know the obvious cost of this bailout: unprecedented deterioration of the Federal balance sheet. But what of the less obvious costs incurred by taking away the rewards of caution by saving the reckless and incompetent? These weak enterprises, financial and other, were not gobbled up by the stronger, more prudent, and more competent natural survivors, and there is a long-term cost in that.

So now, Bernanke begs us to speculate, and we are obedient. Despite being hammered down twice in 10 years and getting punished for speculating, we again pick ourselves up off of the canvas and get back into the good fight. Such persistence is unprecedented – 20 years for each really painful experience has been the normal recovery time – but Uncles Ben and Alan have treated us so well in these two disasters that, with hindsight, they don’t feel so bad after all. Yes, the market is still down a lot in over 10 years and on our data is likely to have a second consecutive very poor decade, but we have had two wonderful recoveries in which the more speculative you were, the more money you made.

So why not break the historical rules and try a third time? Perhaps this time it will be lucky.
Still, it does seem inefficient for the Fed to help us up and then lead us off the cliff again. And to do it twice seems like sadism. And for us to play the game once more seems like lining up behind hot stoves and begging, “Please, can I burn my hand a third time?”

Investors used to be more pain averse. It used to be “once bitten, twice shy.” This time, surely it should be “twice bitten, once bloody shy!” The key shift seems to be the confidence we now have in Bernanke’s soldiering on with low rates and moral hazard to the bitter end, if necessary, cliff or no cliff.

The concept of moral hazard has changed. It used to be a vague expression of intent: “If anything goes wrong, I will help you if I can.” It seems to have been transmuted into a cast-iron commitment. The Fed seems to be pledging that it will bail us out after every flood. All
that is lacking is a rainbow!