저자: JeremyGrantham · 외국인
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미국 주식시장은 2021년 거품이 아직 완전히 꺼지지 않았으며, 2023년 내 경기침체는 어렵더라도 2024년 초까지 이어질 수 있는 하락 국면이 올 것이라는 전망. 거시/금리: 연준은 경기침체 예측에 실패해 왔고 거품을 조장한 뒤 그 디플레이션 효과는 인정하지 않는다고 비판. 인플레이션은 과거 10년 평균보다 높은 수준으로 재진입했으며 금리도 높게 유지될 것이라고 봄. 저금리가 자산가격을 밀어올린다는 논리 제시. 밸류에이션: S&P500은 2009년 약 1,000에서 약 4,500까지 상승. 미국 PER 약 22배로 인도(약 24배)를 제외하면 주요국 중 최고 수준이고 프랑스 16배, 일본 14배, 영국 10배, 중국 9배, 브라질 6배와 비교. 다만 과거 30년 평균 수준과 비교하면 미국 증시가 유지될 가능성도 있다고 인정. 투자 조언: 10만 달러 보유자에게는 글로벌 인덱스 펀드를 추천하되 가능하다면 미국 외 투자 비중을 높이라고 권고. 거품은 주로 미국에 집중되어 있다고 판단. 인간 심리 측면에서 FOMO와 뉴턴의 남해회사 버블 사례를 들어 거품 형성 원리 설명. 리스크: 2021 기술주 거품 붕괴 진행 중, AI 관련 소규모 거품, 소수 대형주 집중 상승, 이익 감소 및 경기침체에 따른 주가 하락 가능성. 출연자 전망: 2023년 내 경기침체는 가능성이 낮으나 2024년 초까지 주가 하락 국면 지속 전망.
다듬은 글
do you think we're in a major bubble now at right now in the United States, and do you think the tech bubble has burst sufficiently, so that the tech bubble burst is over?
Throughout his over 50-year career, billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham has developed a reputation as something of a doomsday oracle. He became famous for predicting some of the biggest stock market crashes of all time, such as the dot-com crash in 2000, the financial crisis in 2008, and most recently the tech bubble in 2021. In 2023, the U.S. stock market is once again bumping up against all-time highs, and Grantham is warning that the market is dangerously overvalued. Here's what he had to say.
I think we are descending from the 2021 bubble, which was one of the great bubbles. This should normally be a deflationary period, a deflating period, which is a function of whether earnings decline, whether profit margins decline, and whether the economy goes into recession. We will have a recession, running perhaps deep into next year, with an accompanying decline in stock prices. So the recession that I'm predicting probably won't happen in 2023, but it may start in 2023.
The Federal Reserve recently said they think we've cleared the recession hurdle and no longer really project a recession. Do you disagree with the Fed on that? I think the Fed's record on these things is wonderful. It's almost guaranteed to be wrong. They have never called a recession, particularly not the ones following the great bubbles. They prided themselves on stimulating the bubbles and took credit for the beneficial effect of higher asset prices on the economy. They have never claimed credit for the deflationary effect of asset prices breaking, and they always do.
You said not too long ago that you weren't a big fan of Jay Powell and the way he's been handling inflation. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Do you think he's done a better job recently in getting inflation under control? I think it's largely out of his hands. The forces at work, I suspect, mean inflation will never be as low as its average over the last 10 years. We have re-entered a period of moderately higher inflation and therefore moderately higher interest rates. In the end, life is simple: low rates push asset prices higher, higher rates push asset prices down, and we're now in an era that will average higher rates than we had over the last 10 years.
The U.S. stock market has soared over the last nearly 15 years. Take a look at this chart, which shows the performance of the S&P 500 index over the last couple of decades. For background, the S&P 500 is generally regarded as a proxy for the U.S. stock market. We can see that it has skyrocketed from roughly 1,000 in February 2009 to its current level of approximately 4,500. The last 14 or so years have been one of the best periods in stock market history for investors, but the concern that Grantham and many others have is that the market has soared to unsustainably high levels.
One of the biggest drivers pushing the stock market toward potential bubble territory was historically low interest rates. U.S. interest rates spent the better part of the last 15 years near zero percent, and these low rates acted like jet fuel for the stock market. To truly appreciate Grantham's comments, you first have to understand the relationship between interest rates and asset values. Asset values are just a fancy way of saying things people own because they produce income for them: stocks, bonds, and real estate are the most common types of assets in the average investor's portfolio. The value of any asset, including stocks, is based on the cash it will generate for you as the owner, discounted back to the present day using an interest rate. I know this may sound complicated, but it's actually a relatively straightforward concept.
Let's say you buy a stock that produces 30 dollars a year in cash for you every year for 10 years. At the end of the 10 years, you can sell the stock for 300 dollars. You know how much cash the stock will produce for you as the owner, but there's one last step in finding how much that stock is worth today: you have to discount those cash flows back to the present day using an interest rate. The reason you discount them is that a dollar today is not worth the same as a dollar 10 years from now. To demonstrate, if you had to choose between receiving 10,000 dollars today or 10,000 dollars ten years from now, which would you pick? Obviously, you'd want the money today. In investing, this concept is called the time value of money.
For this example, I'll start with a 20 percent interest rate, which gives a stock price of 174 dollars per share. To show exactly what I mean when I say lower interest rates are jet fuel for stock prices, let's see what happens when we decrease the rate. Bringing it down to 15 percent gives a new stock price of 225 dollars. Bringing it down further to 10 percent, the stock price soars to 300 dollars. At 6 percent, the price hits 388 dollars per share. Notice that the amount of cash the stock produces stays exactly the same; the only thing that changed was the interest rate. The declining rate was powerful enough to push the stock price from 174 dollars a share at a 20 percent rate all the way to 388 dollars at a 6 percent rate, an increase in value of a whopping 123 percent, even though the stock didn't produce a single additional dollar of cash flow. You can see why low interest rates can push stock prices to mind-boggling levels.
While this example shows how low interest rates can contribute to a bubble, there is also a decidedly human element. Listen to Grantham explain. The tech bubble burst that we saw beginning, let's say, last year has not yet completely played itself out, and we have a little mini bubble in artificial intelligence. There were very big moves in a dozen very big stocks, and many people are affected, but it's not affecting the overall economy as much as the whole tech sector did. In comparison to 2021 and 1929, it's much smaller. So what is it about human nature that makes people want to participate in a bubble? They see the stock market going up and think they're going to miss something. Even the famous Sir Isaac Newton participated in a bubble. He thought he was missing something, mortgaged his house, put all his money into the South Sea Company, and lost everything. Even someone that smart was unable to resist the bubble.
Why can't humans resist bubbles? I always like to say there's nothing more supremely irritating than watching your neighbors get rich. It is just irresistible to try to join in, and when enough people hit the inflection point, it sucks in everybody. The great bubbles are the interesting ones. Mostly there's a nice balance between bulls and bears, and once in a blue moon, every 20 years or so, you'll hit an inflection point where enough people become bullish that they stop thinking about fundamentals. Bubbles form in large part due to FOMO, the fear of missing out, as people see their neighbors getting rich and want a piece of the action. This dynamic has existed as long as financial markets have.
John Pierpont Morgan, better known as J.P. Morgan, was one of the most powerful bankers and industrialists at the turn of the 20th century. You probably know him as the founder of what is now the banking empire JPMorgan Chase. He saw frequent booms and busts in the early days of the stock market, which prompted him to utter the now infamous line: "Nothing so undermines your financial judgment as the sight of your neighbor getting rich." Even the brightest minds of all time can fall victim to the prospect of easy money. The epitome of this is Isaac Newton and the South Sea Bubble. Newton is universally regarded as one of the greatest scientific minds ever. He invented the theory of gravity, calculus, and the three laws of motion on which all mechanics is based. Despite all that, he still lost it all in a financial bubble in 1711.
Newton invested a substantial portion of his wealth in the South Sea Company, a British trading company established to reduce the national debt and exploit lucrative trade opportunities in the South Seas. It was the talk of the town, promising unimaginable riches to its investors. Newton's involvement was initially profitable, and he reaped significant gains as the stock soared to dizzying heights. But letting greed get the best of him, Newton mortgaged his house to go all in on the stock. The speculative frenzy eventually reached unsustainable levels, and in 1720 the bubble burst, sending the stock plummeting in what is now considered one of the most infamous financial crashes in history. Newton's intellect couldn't shield him from the consequences. He famously remarked, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." In the aftermath, his investments became nearly worthless. His involvement serves as a reminder of the unpredictability and irrationality of financial markets, affecting even the most brilliant minds of their time. If Isaac Newton wasn't smart enough to avoid a bubble, who are we to think we can navigate one?
Thankfully, Grantham has some advice on what to do now, in 2023. If I said to you, "I'm not that wealthy, I have $100,000, and I'd like to put it somewhere where I'm not going to lose it, what would you recommend?" Just an index fund, or something else? I think a global index fund that has most of its money outside the U.S. would be the choice, and if they were up to it, I would say only invest outside the U.S. for the time being, because this overpricing in the market is mainly a U.S. event. Markets outside the U.S. are not particularly overpriced. According to Grantham, the stock market bubble is concentrated in the U.S. for the most part.
One way to gauge where valuations stand is the price-to-earnings ratio, or P/E ratio for short. Think of a P/E ratio as the price you must pay per unit of current earnings. If a stock trades for 20 dollars and produces one dollar per share of earnings, the P/E ratio is 20. Put another way, you pay 20 dollars for each dollar of current earnings. As a general rule of thumb, the higher the P/E ratio, the more expensive the stock, and the lower the ratio, the cheaper it is. Entire country stock markets have P/E ratios too. As of the making of this video, the U.S. stock market trades at a P/E ratio of 22 times, one of the highest in the world. The only major market with a significantly higher ratio is India, at nearly 24 times. France trades at roughly 16 times, Australia 15 times, Canada and Japan are closer to 14 times, Germany roughly 13 times, the United Kingdom 10 times, China 9 times, Italy 8 times, and Brazil just 6 times.
The big gap between the U.S. P/E ratio and these other large countries seems to support Grantham's argument that the U.S. stock market is overvalued. However, this only tells part of the story. The U.S. stock market contains many of the world's largest and most profitable companies, and investors across the world invest substantial sums in U.S. companies, pushing prices up even further. It's also important to see how the U.S. P/E ratio compares to its own history. Using the S&P 500 as a proxy, it trades at a P/E ratio comparable to levels it has traded at over the last 30 years. It's plausible that Grantham is wrong and the U.S. stock market stays at these levels for years to come.
So there you have it. Make sure to like this video, and see you soon.
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