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Jeremy Grantham
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Jeremy Grantham
Investment returns are heavily weighted to the profitability characteristics of an investment combined with the additional supportive or mitigating effects of the initial valuation levels.
While Jeremy Grantham uses valuation metrics and methodologies that are far too blunt and generalized to typically interest someone like me who invests in specific businesses and situations, it is always valuable to see where any measures of valuation are versus historical levels.
In this article, Grantham sees the bubbles in U.S. valuations extending into what he terms a superbubble—"one of only three in modern times in U.S. equities."
But everything has consequences and the consequences this time may or may not include some intractable inflation. But it has already definitely included the most dangerous breadth of asset overpricing in financial history. At some future date, when pessimism rules again as it does from time to time, asset prices will decline. And if valuations across all of these asset classes return even two-thirds of the way back to historical norms, total wealth losses will be on the order of $35 trillion in the U.S. alone.
But everything has consequences and the consequences this time may or may not include some intractable inflation. But it has already definitely included the most dangerous breadth of asset overpricing in financial history. At some future date, when pessimism rules again as it does from time to time, asset prices will decline. And if valuations across all of these asset classes return even two-thirds of the way back to historical norms, total wealth losses will be on the order of $35 trillion in the U.S. alone.