What Worries Jeremy Grantham Now

Given that he was one of the few to warn about both the Internet bubble and the housing and credit bubble before they burst, Jeremy Grantham’s worries and concerns about the economy and stock market carry a lot of weight. So what is GMO’s front man concerned about these days? Resources.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Grantham reiterates his concern about what he says are looming shortages in food, fertilizer, and metals. “The investment implications are, of course, own stock in the ground, own great resources, reserves of phosphorous, potash, oil, copper, tin, zinc — you name it,” he says. ” I think oil, the metals and particularly the fertilizers, I would own — and the most important of all is food. The pressures on food are worse than anything else, and therefore, what is the solution? Very good farming, which can be done. The emphasis from an investor’s point of view is on very good farmland.”

Grantham says we are now living in the world in which “everything is overpriced” thanks to the “wicked plan” of the Federal Reserve. Stocks, he says, “can go a lot higher than this with the Fed pushing it. And we can have another real bubble. Based on the Fed’s history, that seems to be what they like.”

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