Way back in the 4th quarter of 2015, GMO’s Jeremy Grantham wrote a piece titled ‘Part II: 2015 and 2016, U. S. Equity Bubble Update, and Yet More on Oil.’
It is easy to forget, but at that point, the S&P was trading around 2,000 and everyone was bearish. QE had ended, the Fed was fumbling with their first hike and ‘fully valued’ were the buzz words used to describe US equities.
Yet Jeremy didn’t write the all-too-easy piece about how stocks were about to crash. Instead, he acknowledged that equities were expensive, but not yet in bubble territory.
‘On the evaluation front, the market is not quite expensive enough to deserve the bubble title. We at GMO have defined a bubble as a 2-standard deviation event (2-sigma). We believe that all great investment bubbles reached that level and market events that fell short of 2-sigma, did not feel like the real thing.’ ‘… I must admit to feeling nervous for this year’s equity outlook in the U. S. But I am not entirely convinced. Sure, we can have a regular bear market. That is always the case. But the BIG ONE? I doubt it.’
So while most everyone else was predicting a U. S. stock market bear market, Grantham postulated the most likely course for equities was to become even more expensive.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Apr 3, 2017.
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