What Is a Perpetual Bearer Bond?

Jeremy Grantham blames the US Federal Reserve for creating a bubble in asset prices—one he says has a long way to go before it’s fully deflated. As a result, stock prices may not reach bottom until late next year, he warns.

The 84-year-old co-founder of investment firm GMO joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain what he calls the current, “meat grinder” phase of the market, and why he believes the central bank has “hardly gotten anything right.”  

“Since Alan Greenspan first arrived—Paul Volcker knew what he was doing—but since then it’s been a long, continuous horror show,” Grantham says of US monetary policy. “They’ve engaged in policies that drive up the prices of assets, other things being even, and create spectacular overpriced bubbles. They then break because that’s what bubbles have to do. They simply break of their own extreme overpricing, and we pay a very tough price.”

Grantham also discusses broader market risks, including shortages of labor and natural resources, the climate crisis, de-globalization and a new version of the Cold War. “All of these long-term factors are beginning to bite,” he says. “This will make this particular down-leg more dangerous, and perhaps worse than we anticipated.”

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