저자: JeremyGrantham/진행자Weronika · 외국인
요약 보기
결론: 그랜섬은 현재 시장을 버블 구간으로 보며, 기술주·극단적 투기 지표가 최고조이므로 공정가치 대비 큰 조정(주가 약 50% 하락 가능성)을 예상한다. 그랜섬의 버블 정의와 현재 진단: 버블은 장기 강세장 말기에 평균의 2~3배 속도로 가속하며, 역사상 최고 수준의 고평가가 나타나는 현상이다. 러셀2000은 3개월 50% 상승, 나스닥은 6개월 50% 상승으로 1999년 슈퍼 기술버블보다 크다고 언급했다. 투기 지표: 밈주식, 개인 참여 비율(18개월간 약 3배), 페니스톡·옵션 거래량 폭증, 역대 최고 수준의 신용거래 등 투기 징후가 모두 나타났다. 뉴스도 금융면이 아닌 1면에 등장한다. 과거 버블 사례: 1929년 미국, 1972년(추정), 2000년 기술버블, 2007~08년 주택버블, 1989년 일본(주식과 부동산 동시 버블)이 대표적이다. 그랜섬은 현재가 이 기준을 모두 충족한다고 판단했다. 버블 정점의 기준: 정점 수준은 공정가치와 무관하며, 버블이 높을수록 공정가치 복귀 시 고통이 커진다. 동시에 여러 자산군이 버블이면 피해가 극대화된다(일본 사례). 공정가치 전망: S&P500 공정가치를 약 2400으로 가정했고, 최근 상승분 20~30%는 되돌림 가능성이 크며 공정가치 복귀 시 시장이 약 절반 수준으로 줄어들 수 있다고 봤다. 추가 20% 상승 시 그 손실도 감수해야 한다고 언급했다. 미국 주택시장 사례: 2007년 주택버블은 약 7조 달러 손실을 낳았고, 서브프라임 등 금융상품과 결합해 주식시장 추가 손실 및 금융위기로 이어졌다. 2000년 대비 비교: 2000년에는 주식만 고평가였고 REIT 할인, 물가연동채(TIPS 4.3%) 등 부동산과 채권은 저평가였다. 버블 정점 신호와 메커니즘: 최대 차입, 최대 열기가 나타나며 이후 열기가 점진적으로 식는다. 위험주가 우량주보다 훨씬 더 오르는 현상이 경고 신호다. 촉발 요인으로 글로벌 코로나 문제, 지속적 인플레이션 등을 꼽았으나 예상치 못한 악재가 핵심이라고 봤다. 노동시장·경제 구조: 미국의 노동참여율은 2000년 대비 하락했고 유럽보다 비경제활동인구가 많다. 생산성 이익은 상위 10%·1%·0.1%에 집중되었고, 기업은 확장 대신 이익 극대화(자사주 매입, 인력 감축)에 치중해 장기 성장이 둔화됐다. 투자 관점: 그랜섬은 버블 정점을 정확히 맞히기 어렵다고 보며, 궁극적 목표는 버블 구간을 피해 결국 수익을 내는 것이라고 강조했다.
다듬은 글
The way we stayed the unemployment rate, we’re always very proud but we have more people not working than Europe does. They seem to have found a new willingness to resign if the job is crummy and they’re not paid enough. They have been treated diabolically badly since about 1975. If you look at the increase for an hour worked, it’s up 10 or 15% adjusted for inflation in 45 years.
In France, it’s up 150%. If you read Business Week, as I like to say, it would’ve appeared over that 45 years that we had done nothing but kick French bottoms because of Euro sclerosis, French incompetence, bureaucrats, et cetera. They take too much time off, they have long holidays but when they work, they’re very productive and they get paid a ton more money than they used to and we do not.
Even the lonely Brits are up 60%. The Japanese are up over a hundred. How is it that our average hour worked in manufacturing has done so badly? Hi, this is your host, Weronika! In today’s episode, we’ll discuss Jeremy Grantham’s insights on what are the typical characteristics of bubbles, and what can indicate the bubble peak has been reached!
Jeremy Grantham is a billionaire, the co-founder and long-term investment strategist at GMO, one of the world’s most well-respected asset management firms. He is an investing legend known for studying historical changes in markets and predicting results for many years into the future. He successfully identified the major corrections such as the Japanese market in 1989, the tech bubble of 2000, and the global financial crisis of 2008.
Let’s learn Jeremy Grantham’s top insights about how he studies bubbles and how you can prepare for them! Jeremy Grantham explains what are bubbles, what are the characteristics of bubbles, and what can happen when more than one asset class is bubbling at the same time. Bubbles are characterized typically at the end of a long bull market by a period where they accelerate, and they start to rise at two or three times the average speed of the bull market, which they did last year, of course.
And the Russell 2000 actually went up an amazing 50% in three months, ending in early February this year, which compares very favorably to the 50% rally in ’99 of the super tech bubble. And the NASDAQ went up 50% in six months. So, this was bigger and better. And, of course, they’re always extremely overpriced by average historical standards.
And this one, there are a few people who would still argue that 2000 was higher, but most of the data suggest that this is the new American record or highest-priced stocks in history. And then, there’s the most important thing of all, which is crazy behavior, the kind of meme stock, high participation by individuals, which has kind of tripled in 18 months to an abnormally high level, enormous trading volume in penny stocks, enormous trading volume in options, and huge margin levels, peak borrowing of all kinds.
And the news is on the front page. The news is not on the financial page, the market, big market events are on the front page. This is all characteristic of the handful of great bubbles that we’ve had, which are 1929 in America, maybe in 1972, certainly 2000. And in the housing market, certainly 2007, ’08.
In Japan, 1989 was the biggest and the best of all the major markets and even bigger and better in their real estate market. So, we’ve checked off all the boxes. Now, the question is how high is high? Very hard to tell always where the peak will be. Or what you do know is that how high the peak is, has no bearing at all on what the fair value is.
So, let us assume that the fair value on the S&P is, let us say, 2400. Whether it stops at 4300 or 5300 doesn’t change that. What it does change is the amount of pain that you get to go back to fair value and below. The case in point would be Japan. Japan had never sold over 25 times earnings in 1987, ’88, 1989 until it went through 25 and went all the way up, we were told at the time, to 65 times.
And the price you paid for that is that they’re still not back to the same price they were in 1989. And their real estate market, which was an even bigger bubble than the stock market. In fact, I believe, the biggest bubble in history bigger than the South Sea bubble and the tulips, the land under the emperor’s palace really was worth the entire State of California.
And the price they paid was that their land is still not back to 1989 levels. So 32 years later, they’re still down. And that’s how you get a major drag on the economy because when you mark down housing and land, it’s an even bigger and more dangerous business than the stock market. And if you do it at the same time as the stock market, then you have an enormous loss of perceived value.
And that is a big, big drag on the economy, which the Japanese have had to absorb. And it took them perhaps 20 years to do that. So, you profoundly do not wish for a super high level to your bubble. And you profoundly do not wish for more than one asset class to be bubbling at the same time. And Japan made that terrible mistake and paid a very high price to have real estate and stocks at the same time.
We paid somewhat the same price in 2007 because we had the first really interesting housing bubble in American history, we had never had one before. And it was the kind that was so extreme, it would only occur every 100 years or so. And we worked out that if it went back down to trend, it would cost $7 trillion.
And it did go back perfectly, it was a very well-behaved bubble. It went smoothly back at the same speed that it had gone up, three years up, three years down. And then for good measure, as is usually the case, it went below the old trend line value and added another couple of trillion dollars of pain by the housing market going even lower.
And that housing market was so big and profound and so accompanied by financial instruments of the notorious subprime variety that it took the stock market down with it and caused, obviously, a financial crisis. And the stock market threw in another $7 trillion of loss of value. So, you had a double whammy there which would guarantee a tougher recession from the negative income effect of which we had.
2000 is a very interesting contrast because 2000 was a much higher equity bubble than 2008. But the real estate market was cheap, actually, very cheap. The REITs were selling cheaper than the value of their properties. And the properties themselves were cheaper than the cost of building them. And the yield on the REIT portfolio at the very top of the market was 9.1%.
Secondly, bonds were cheap. Bonds were incredibly cheap. And the new inflation-protected bond called the TIP had just been introduced, and it yielded 4.3%. Just imagine that 4.3% guaranteed protected against inflation, guaranteed good money by the government. And the regular bond market was very cheap.
So, bonds were cheap. Real estate was very cheap. And only the stock market was expensive. He also breaks down what is the indication that suggests we have reached the peak of a bubble, and what are the mechanisms that influence a bubble proceeding - based on history. Let me say that we typically identify a bubble zone, often, it went on quite a lot longer.
But it always fell below the point where we had suggested it was entering bubble territory. So, once it broke through the peak, the 1929 peak of 21 times earnings, we started to be bearish in 1997, but only a little bearish. And then, as the peaks rose and rose from 21 times to eventually 35, we became more and more bearish until we were screaming bearish and still the market went up for another year.
So, we were pretty early. In the housing bubble, we did much, much better. We basically walked people through the last year or 18 months pointing out how dangerous the subprime and so on in the housing market, and how much damage it would do. We pretty well got that one right. And of course, we got extremely lucky on reinvesting when terrified, which was posted the day the market hit the low in March of ’09.
And here we are, I thought, we entered bubble territory about last June, about a year ago. And I’ve made it quite clear what I consider a definition of success. And that is only that sooner or later, you will have made money to have sidestepped the bubble phase. So, I am suggesting that the last 20% or 30% of the market will be retraced with interest.
And I would expect that the fair value of this market would require the market to approximately half. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it did much less than that. And if it goes up another 20%, it will have to get rid of that as well, as a bonus. You can very seldom identify the pin that pops it, 1929, no one’s agreed yet what the pin was.
And they say about 1929, the “selling” came in from the country, which means that the initial selling pressure was from the Midwest, not from Boston and Philadelphia, and New York. What was going on was probably that the economy, which had been unbelievably strong, was turning down. But because of the lags in the data, the city slickers didn’t know it, but the guys out in Chicago who actually had businesses and farms and capital and so on, they knew that things had turned out and they decided sitting around the club at lunch that they better take a few profits.
And so, selling came in from the country. And the bubbles tend to peak at absolute optimism when the economy looks perfect and you’re extrapolating it forever. And that’s the definition of a bubble. And they have to be facilitated by friendly monetary conditions. And when you’ve had a wonderful economy and friendly monetary conditions, you pretty well always had a bubble.
They’re not that common. And here we are, again, we feel the economy looks wonderful. If we extrapolate it forever, it means it’s worth a huge price. Of course, it never does last forever, but if it did it, it would be worth a huge prize. And that’s the mechanics that is going on. And then you can say, what might rattle the cage?
Well, I think, unexpected COVID problems on a global basis and in the US. I rattle the cage. Unexpected inflation that doesn’t go away in a hurry, and then starts to run into longer-term inflationary pressures which we could discuss, that might rattle the cage. And the biggest cage rattler of all is everything else you haven’t thought about that could go wrong.
And my guess is that’s probably the cause, in the end, of most of the bubbles deflating. The mechanics of a bubble is you have maximum borrowing, maximum enthusiasm. And then the following day, you’re still enthusiastic but not quite as enthusiastic as yesterday. A week later, you’re not quite as enthusiastic as last week and last month.
And gradually, the enthusiasm level drops off a bit, you have no more money to borrow, you’re fully borrowed, and the buying pressure gradually slows down. And that’s it. And there is a very interesting warning signal that has only happened a few times. And that is, in a bull market, the risky stocks go up a lot more than the blue chips.
Jeremy Grantham also talks about why the cost of education in the US has gone through the roof, why wealthier families don’t decide to have more children, and what the participation rate tells us when we analyze unemployment. It’s a major surprise. You could flip that around and say it was a major surprise that people chose to have big families.
They’re expensive, they take all your time and energy, they take all your money, fewer holidays to Borneo. I mean, the cost of education has gone through the roof. In real terms, adjusted for inflation the cost of education, has just risen remorselessly. If you have three or four children, you need a million dollars of after tax money to get them through colleges et cetera.
You could say it was amazing we had so many children for so long. It’s easy to sympathize with taking the easy way of having one or two children or no children, particularly if you’re a woman just getting on with your life and not having to drag a man and two children around. I have no real understanding of why it came on so quickly in the last 40 years.
There is a lot of short-term stuff here with COVID, but it’s as if COVID bought us the time to reflect on what we were getting from our job. A lot of crummy jobs didn’t seem worth the effort and so people were quicker to resign and we still haven’t reached the utilization rate. Sorry, what is it called?
The percentage of people working is way down from 2000. In 2000, we had about as high a participation rate as anyone on the planet and since then ours has come down, the Italians and so on, have gone up. We have one of the lower participation rates, which is really the definition of unemployment. How many people do you have?
What fraction are working? The rest are in a sense unemployed. We do not equal the EU. The way we stayed the unemployment rate, we’re always very proud but we have more people not working than Europe does. They seem to have found a new willingness to resign if the job is crummy and they’re not paid enough.
They have been treated diabolically badly since about 1975. If you look at the increase for an hour worked, it’s up 10 or 15% adjusted for inflation in 45 years. In France, it’s up 150%. If you read Business Week, as I like to say, it would’ve appeared over that 45 years that we had done nothing but kick French bottoms because of Euro sclerosis, French incompetence, bureaucrats, et cetera.
They take too much time off, they have long holidays but when they work, they’re very productive and they get paid a ton more money than they used to and we do not. Even the lonely Brits are up 60%. The Japanese are up over a hundred. How is it that our average hour worked in manufacturing has done so badly?
It’s because we have had decent aggregate productivity, but all of those gains have flowed to the top 10%, a lot of it to the top 1%, et cetera and a lot of that to the top point mark. In a way, I think it’s the 0.1% and it’s had its advantages. It’s funded the Grantham Foundation and that in itself, I warmly recommend to old fogies, so you have a sense of purpose and a green agenda is a terrific sense of purpose and as I have explained, incredibly entertaining and stimulating as well and the very best corner of the American capitalist system, which is otherwise looking a little, as I say fat and happy.
I mean, they’re not doing the same entrepreneurial stuff that they did in the sixties. In the sixties, everybody was out for market share, always opening a new factory, which as a portfolio manager was very irritating. Just, as things got tied, all five companies in the paper business would all open new mills at the same time and ruin the profits.
Now they don’t. Now they sit on the expansion, they expand very reluctantly and they concentrate on profits. They keep the staff lean and mean. It’s brilliant for the management who have their stock options and the buyback program, but it’s bad for growth and so the profit margins in Goldilocks era, profit margins have been 30, 40% above the previous hundred years.
Brilliant for the management and brilliant for stockholders and fairly rotten for the economy where the growth has steadily slowed down. Outro That’s it for today’s news! Remember to subscribe to our Daily Newsletter We Study Markets by clicking on the first link in the description below, and subscribe to our channel!
Thank you for watching! He told Li Lu and me that he wanted us to get together for lunch once a month. He basically pretty much instructed us that, “I want the two of you to meet once a month for lunch”.
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