Jeremy Grantham Quotes

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.

The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

The older I get, the less respect I have for the signals emitted by our vaunted speculative markets.

Unfettered markets eventually get out of whack.

Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.

We never know what the Street is going to do with the funky trading.

Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity - or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories.

Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.

I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.

You then get into a period a few years ago, where a lot of external factors that we didn't have anything to do with did hit, and some of them at the same time... devaluations, weak economies, you name it, in various parts of the world.

And so it can be very much in the interest of bank A to sell-short bank B shares, or buy CDSes on bank B, because they have exposure to bank B. It's the responsible thing to do as a fiduciary, and yet if everyone does it at the same time, it's destabilizing because everyone is selling.

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.

Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.

I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional.

…in a crisis of confidence and credit, psychology is the big factor.

Markets shouldn't be moving in a straight line.

Markets are unforgiving, and sometimes they move for reasons we can't possibly foresee.

The markets represent the aggregate interaction of many investors. Their attitudes, philosophies, and behavioral patterns on many levels are predictable... and repetitive.

Economists often get the market wrong.

I've explained before the power psychology has on the markets.

In nine companies out of ten the factor of fluctuation has been a more dominant and important consideration in the matter of investment than has the factor of long-term growth or decline

People are, you know, a little - they're still uncertain, and they're uncertain both because they don't know what might come next in terms of regulations, but they're also uncertain because of changes in a global economy that we're only beginning to take hold of.