Robert Jeremy Goltho Grantham CBE (born 6 October 1938) is a British investor and co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO LLC, a Boston-based asset management firm.
[citation needed] Grantham built much of his investing reputation over the course of his career by identifying speculative asset bubbles as they were unfolding.
[14] In GMO's April 2010 Quarterly Letter, Grantham spoke to the tendency of all bubbles to revert to the mean: For the record, I wrote an article for Fortune published in September 2007 that referred to three "near certainties": profit margins would come down, the housing market would break, and the risk-premium all over the world would widen, each with severe consequences.
[15]In his Fall 2008 GMO letter, Grantham commented on his evaluation of the underlying causes of the then-ongoing world credit crisis: To avoid the development of crises, you need a plentiful supply of foresight, imagination, and competence.
A few quarters ago I likened our financial system to an elaborate suspension bridge, hopefully built with some good, old-fashioned Victorian over-engineering.
The bitterest disappointment of this crisis has been how completely the build-up of the bubbles in asset prices and risk-taking was rationalized and ignored by the authorities, especially the formerly esteemed Chairman of the Fed.
It seemed so inevitable and so merciless, and yet the bosses of Merrill Lynch and Citi and even U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke – none of them seemed to see it coming.
I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget.
Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained – but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.
Grantham has repeatedly said that the rising cost of energy—the most fundamental commodity—between 2002 and 2008 falsely inflated economic growth and GDP figures worldwide and that we have been in a "carbon bubble" for approximately the last 250 years, during which energy was very cheap.
He has stated his opposition to the Keystone Pipeline on the basis of the environmental consequences its construction will bring to Alberta and the planet due to the contribution that burning the extracted oil would make to climate change.
[19][20][21][22] The potential conflict of interest with Grantham's philanthropic engagement for the "beyond coal" campaign of the Sierra Club[23] is criticized in Jeff Gibbs's documentary Planet of the Humans.
[28] He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for philanthropic service to climate change research.