저자: JeremyGrantham · 외국인
요약 보기
Jeremy Grantham은 현재 시장이 역사상 가장 큰 버블 직전에 있다고 보며, 버블 붕괴는 수주~수개월 내 가능하다고 본다. 현재 PER은 상위 5%, 투자심리는 하위 5%로 역사상 유례없는 괴리가 있다고 진단한다. 1929년, 닷컴 버블, 일본 버블과 유사한 광기 징후(회사 설립 시 '돈을 달라'는 식의 투기, 파산 기업이 몇 배 상승하는 현상, 테슬라 가치 4배 상승 등)가 나타난다고 주장한다. 중앙은행과 정부의 대규모 유동성·재정 지출이 자산가격을 밀어 올리고 있으며, 실물경제(고용·생산성·GDP)와 금융자산(PER·주택가격) 간 괴리가 크다고 본다. 버블 붕괴 시점을 정확히 맞추기는 어렵다고 인정한다. 가치주는 역사적 저점 수준으로 언젠가 큰 반전이 있을 것이라고 전망하며, 공매도보다는 일부 미국 주식 보유는 권하지만 깊은 가치주에 한정하라고 조언한다. 신흥국(중국·인도·브라질 등)은 미국 대비 역사적 저평가 상태이며, 향후 20년 글로벌 성장의 상당 부분을 차지할 것이므로 비중 확대를 권한다. 미국은 기대수명·사회지표 등에서 문제가 많지만, 내부 부채는 실질 영향이 작다고 본다. 과거 및 장기적 견해 위주이며, 특정 종목의 1~3개월 가격 방향에 대한 명시적 예측은 없다.
다듬은 글
The biggest bubbles in history, whether it's the statistical bubble of 1929 or the tech bubble, you take a very good economic situation and extrapolate it into the future. If that actually happened, the market would have very high values in terms of net worth and earnings, and so on. It's a very simple game.
Believe in today's perfect conditions and realistically assume they will last forever. If you did that today, extrapolating the current conditions, which are miserable, you would, of course, have the opposite of a bubble. This makes this situation unique. We are in the top 5% in terms of P/E ratio (price-to- earnings ratio) and the bottom 5% in terms of sentiment today.
Therefore, there has never been anything like this in history. And why did this happen? We know the difficulties are covered, and we know that the impulse in stock prices is a combination of central banks, the Federal Reserve, and fiscal spending. It's global. We've never had such a strong global agreement where all governments are looking to spend, and all governments are looking for their central banks to accommodate this.
This is a huge impulse, and what we discovered a long time ago is how effective this is at moving stock prices. It's as if every owner... That which is not absorbed by the real world flows down the path of least resistance to asset prices. This is what is related to a very impressive struggle between the real world of employment productivity and GDP and the paper world of P/E indices and house prices.
Impulse and low interest rates are, of course, a key factor, and an abundant supply of money circulating for people who are likely to buy houses and stocks. This is not necessarily good for the economy in general, and the question is whether the real world will eventually catch up with P/E contracts.
When you buy overvalued assets, you are guaranteed a cheap return, but you are not guaranteed to be ruined next week. My belief is that if you are trying to time the collapse of a bubble, value is not that important. They are all overvalued, and it is very difficult to determine academically whether they are overvalued by 25 times earnings, 35 times earnings, or in Japan, 65 times earnings.
It is very difficult to calculate in any academic way because we are dealing with madness where the peak will happen. I much prefer to look for signs of truly crazy behavior because all the Bubbles that truly collapsed and broke in a spectacular way – what happened with most of them – were preceded by crazy behavior, legendary stories.
This was notably absent, as I wrote and talked about throughout the 10-year bull market. This was really not lacking in the Valley after the Covid-19 low. We saw not only a spectacular rate of intoxication in price increases, double the normal bull market, which is characteristic of this intoxication in the final stage of the bubble, but we also saw a wonderful madness.
Companies promised to use your money, " Give me your money and trust me, I'll do something useful with it." There's a real echo of the South Sea bubble where we have a spectacular opportunity, we can't reveal what the purpose of your money is yet, and they got a lot of money and ran away with it. I 'm not saying that companies will run away with your money, but I am saying that it's a real testament to the speculative nature of buying a bankrupt company and seeing it outperform four, five, six times very quickly, and so on.
You read about Tesla's quadruple valuation from Hand Musk. I have a Tesla, it's a wonderful car, I think the company is spectacularly good. Interesting, but four times the value it had before COVID-19? I don't find that interesting. These stories are everywhere, and they're what you need before a bubble bursts.
We saw this in the early 2000s and at the end of 1929, before the nursery. I saw it in Japan, and here we are again. So I think this is an indicator, not a certainty, but a strong possibility that we are very close to a bubble about to burst. In psychological terms, maybe a matter of weeks or months, not years.
And I'm sympathetic, or I argue, "What should I do? The yields are so low, but the market doesn't care that you don't have safe and easy investments, and your desperation is your problem." What it does is, in the difference between short- term and long-term, in the short term you can say you get nothing with fixed income, but you get something with stocks, even if it's half of what it seemed to be—no yield—it's still better than nothing, so I'll do it, and the price is right." This is a logic you hear, one way or another, everywhere.
And then there's the long-term argument that, in the end, all assets have an allocation cost, the prices of houses. They increase, but if you can build one for half the price, you put a limit on that. If you can create a new company for half the price, I'm a big fan of venture capital, which is why I've spent my whole life fighting the Federal Reserve.
Frankly, what I'll say is this: normally the Federal Reserve wins many more rounds than we do, but in the end we got knocked out. In the end, the Federal Reserve couldn't keep the tech bubble in. It definitely took the P/E ratio to 21 times the 1929 earnings and then to 35 times, but it can't continue indefinitely.
In Japan, they reached 65 times the price, and the price they paid when they finally brought it down was that 31 years later we are far from being near the 1989 peak. If you look at their real estate market, which was an even bigger bubble, I think the biggest bubble including the Tulip Mania, they spent 30 years in decline and now they are hitting the bottom.
Maybe, but they are hitting the bottom with prices in central cities at a quarter of what they were before. We spent a day or two checking, and it was really true, and the price you pay for that is that you can... To be 50 years later and still not back to that level, I would say don't fight the Federal Reserve if you're a short-term player, but if you're a long-term player you have to be prepared to fight the Federal Reserve on some occasions, since the experience wasn't really increasing, when you're faced with a global economic slowdown you have to kick, and that requires massive, sustained government stimulus for a few years.
Discussing with the big guys who called me a bet, even among Valley managers, about this moment being different, I maintain that one of the most dangerous words is "this moment is different" should be replaced by an even more dangerous word, which is "this moment is never different." It's a very risky idea to think that there can never be important and permanent changes, and I think almost everything has changed since 2000, so the certainties we used to have no longer exist, but that was five years ago.
That was before the most massive movement against value. Anyway, however you want to think about it, now we're off the scale, so I don't think value is as reliable and useful a weapon as it was in the 70 years prior to... 2000, but I think it's a very useful weapon when you push the parameters so far that it hits historical lows relative to the raw zones.
So maybe we won't go back 120% as I would have calculated 20 years ago, but we will have a very large reversal in favor of value stocks sooner or later. I think we can be quite sure about that. And one of the things that comes down to the nature of the facts is that I don't necessarily recommend short selling, but I do recommend owning some US stocks.
You can face emerging market stocks. Emerging markets are not only at an unprecedented low relative to the United States, but they are actually very cheap, absolutely, compared to the United States. And who are they? They are China, which according to the World Bank will account for more than 30% of global economic growth in the next 20 years, and India, which will be an increasingly important player, and then we have Brazil, and so on.
Collectively, they represent the largest share of global GDP. Now, these things move very fast. I think betting on emerging markets is really betting on the future relative to the past. The only thing that makes life interesting outside of emerging markets is the... Feng Shui, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google—intellectually interesting, but when they rise 10 times quickly, you have to say it's intellectually more interesting than financially interesting.
And the reason I don't recommend selling the discovery is that it's a desperately difficult game. You can never be sure that Feng Shui and growth stocks haven't worked. The Last Move will take you out; you simply won't be able to bear the pain. As for government spending, when done correctly, it's very good for the economy, very good for workers.
Even silly Europe has more than doubled its population. China and Vietnam have more than 10 times the number of people, and so on. It's a bit complicated. My advice is very simple: emphasize emerging markets and de-emphasize the United States. If you need to own US stocks, go for deep value. I didn't say this three or five years ago, but if I had to choose between doing that and avoiding the United States completely, I would choose the latter.
You only need one large asset class to get rich. Emerging markets, as I said, are responsible for more than half of the global GDP, are growing much faster, and because of the size of the... China is guaranteed that this will happen; they will have a much better growth rate this year, even under stress, much better than the GDP growth of the countries included, and they have 26 countries covering every industry you could want.
Why would you be complaining when you have such a good opportunity? It's 10 times cheaper; it's a great opportunity in relation to most things that are important to me. I'll make the sick joke that yes, America is exceptional, but it has become exceptionally bad. We have the worst life expectancy, the worst mobility, the worst social measures in almost everything: the number of 16-year-olds in prison, the number of people who are shot, and so on.
It's quite distressing. However, the old rates are 15 and maybe never again. Let me just point that out. But that's just double-entry accounting; every dollar of debt has someone to whom a dollar is owed. Why would I care if every Japanese person owed another Japanese person tons of money, so that in total the suspicion would be frightening compared to historical standards?
Still, from the United States' point of view, looking at the internal debt, this is totally relevant and has had, by the way, no material consequences that I can see. They have many problems... time and time again. But none of them really came down to leverage.
Comments 0