Jeremy Grantham

“The language 'It's too late' is very unsuitable for most environmental issues. It's too late for the dodo and for people who've starved to death already, but it's not too late to prevent an even bigger crisis. The sooner we act on the environment, the better.”

“I find the parallels between how some investors refuse to recognise the trends and our reaction to some of our environmental challenges very powerful. There is an unwillingness to process unpleasant data.”

“Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to.”

“We live on a finite planet. We have finite resources, and we're running out of good, arable land.”

“Market timing, by the way, is a tag some buy-and-hold investors use to put down anything that involves using your brain. These are the same people who like to watch the locomotive coming and get run down in the name of discipline.”

“Think how weird profit margins are: We've got high unemployment and financial crises - and world record profit margins. People think the American market is very cheap. We don't. The market quite incorrectly gives full credit to today's earnings.”

“Remember that history always repeats itself. Every great bubble in history has broken. There are no exceptions.”

“If there's unemployment, having the government help reduce that unemployment, increase employment directly is a pretty good idea. It's not driving out competition; it's not crowding out.”

“I don't mind the government accruing debts as long as every dollar is spent effectively with a high return. That works out fine. If you accumulate debts and waste your money, that's, of course, a disaster.”

“By background I'm both a Quaker and a Yorkshireman, which I like to call double jeopardy.”

“Libertarians believe that any government interference is bad. Anyone with a brain knows that climate change needs governmental leadership, and they can smell this is bad news for their philosophy. Their ideology is so strongly held that, remarkably, it's overcoming the facts.”

“I think I'm right-brained, incapable of managing my way out of a brown paper bag.”

“The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn't true.”

“Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan, but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.”

“I think the Fed is not designed to have effective tools to deal with the economy. It should settle for just controlling the money supply. And - if it insists, it can worry about inflation.”

“Investment bubbles and high animal spirits do not materialize out of thin air. They need extremely favorable economic fundamentals together with free and easy, cheap credit, and they need it for at least two or three years. Importantly, they also need serial pleasant surprises in such critical variables as global GNP growth.”

“History speaks pretty clearly that the markets do better with Democrats. Republicans' ideas of what constitutes fiscal responsibility simply are not good for the stock market. Democrats have many tendencies, but one of them is to look after the workers, and actually that tends to be good for demand and good for markets.”

“As a professional, you can afford to pick some stocks and be wrong about a few of them. To keep your job, you cannot take the risk of being seen to be wrong about the 'big picture' for very long.”

“When it comes to portfolios, my personal advice is for anyone who can, put money into forestry or farmland. Long term, you would probably never come near their returns in the stock market. In the world that I see, land is golden.”

“Capitalism believes that its remit is exclusively to make maximum short-term profits.”