Jeremy Grantham

“I like to be right. I try not to miss the big ideas, forget the little ones, and try to get them right. End of job description.”

“Equities are boring; bonds are disgusting.”

“You don't get rewarded for taking risk; you get rewarded for buying cheap assets. And if the assets you bought got pushed up in price simply because they were risky, then you are not going to be rewarded for taking a risk; you are going to be punished for it.”

“We used to live in a world where the price of resources came down steadily, and now the world has changed. You have a great mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth.”

“The only investable idea I have real confidence in is farming and forestry. My family owns some forest, and now we're closing on a farm. Make the farming more sustainable and the forestry more sustainable, and everyone benefits.”

“Battering down solar cells on the roofs of Wal-Marts in California. I think that will be some of the highest-return investments that anyone ever makes.”

“You can't run the economy on BMWs alone. If the average person is in a pickle, how do you have a healthy economy?”

“There is no single theory that is used in economics that considers the finite nature of resources. It's shocking.”

“If you're afraid of inflation, I think - and if you can bring yourself to have a long horizon - and when I say long, I mean ten to 20 years, not the usual ten to 20 weeks - that locking up resources in the ground is a terrific idea.”

“Modern agriculture has been accurately described as a way of turning oil into food. As the price of oil continues to rise, so will the price of food.”

“Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas - the backbone of the Industrial Revolution - will be a distant memory by 2050. Much higher-cost remnants will still be available, but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply as before.”

“At least us old men remember what a real bear market is like, and the young men haven't got a clue.”

“I have an eccentric view on commodities not necessarily shared by my colleagues - or by almost anybody. And that is, we're running out of everything.”

“We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.”

“If you're saying something that people don't want to hear or accept, a significant proportion of them will reply with hostility. Not because they know the facts, or because they have researched it themselves, but because they're so psychologically involved in believing good news that they will oppose it with a reflex.”

“The stock market is overpriced. Everything is overpriced. Junk is king.”

“One day we will have more inflation, and our bonds will bleed like a pig. The only reason for buying long bonds is short-term or as a desperate haven for terrorized investors. But the potential to make longer-term real money is naught.”

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

“The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”

“Bubbles have quite a few things in common, but housing bubbles have a spectacular thing in common, and that is every one of them is considered unique and different.”