Grantham - Seven Lean Years

It still seems a safe bet that seven lean years await us...

My theory is that the market always displayed a belief in a type of primitive market efficiency decades before the academics took it up. It is a belief that if the market once sold much higher, it must mean something. And in the case of 1930, hadn’t Irving Fisher, arguably the greatest American economist of the century, said that the 1929 highs were completely justifi ed and that it was the decline that was hysterical pessimism? Hadn’t E.L. Smith also explained in his Common Stocks as Long Term Investments (1924) – a startling precursor to Jeremy Siegel’s dangerous book Stocks for the Long Run (1994) – that stocks would always beat bonds by divine right?

---Jeremy Grantham 3Q09 letter

Bill: Lots of good stuff in the above!