管理规模超过1000亿美元，美国知名投资机构GMO(Grantham， Mayo， & van Otterloo )的联合创始人杰利米·格拉汉姆(Jeremy Grantham)近日发布报告《荒野逃生(LET THE WILD RUMPUS BEGIN)》。
报告警告美股投资者，美国股市长达10年的牛市泡沫即将破裂，美国三大指数之一的标普500的下跌幅度可能达到45%。但他看好新兴市场的股票，以及日本等发达国家的低估值公司。同时，他提醒投资者，持有现金可能是更好的选择，或者配置一定的金银等贵金属。
格拉汉姆并非普通分析师。作为美国头部资产管理机构的掌门人，其过往曾多次准确预测美国股市的泡沫破裂，包括2000年互联网泡沫破灭、2008年牛市顶部、以及2009年熊市底部等。考虑到GMO在国际资本市场的影响力，以及格拉汉姆过往的精准预测，记者将报告的主要逻辑和结论进行翻译。
概述
今天的美国股市，正处于过去一百年来第四次的超级泡沫当中。每一次超级泡沫的出现，都有一些共同的特征。目前，这些特征都已经出现了。
这些超级泡沫的倒数第二个阶段是资产价格上涨速度加快到整个牛市平均速度的两到三倍。在本轮超级泡沫中，美国股市的加速上涨始于2020初，在2021年2月结束。在此期间，纳斯达克指数从2019年底上升了58%(如果从新冠疫情暴发后的低点开始算，涨幅更是达到惊人的105%)。
超级泡沫的最后一个阶段表现是投机性股票表现不佳，但蓝筹股仍在继续上涨。1929年和2000年股市泡沫前曾经发生过，而现在正在发生同样的事。出现这种现象的一个合理解释是，经验丰富的专业人士知道市场价格过高。但出于商业原因，他们必须继续在悬崖边上的舞池里继续跳舞，并假装若无其事。如果最终不得不跳下悬崖，他们宁愿抱着更安全的股票。
That's why at the end of a superbubble, speculative stocks fall first, and then the fall slowly spreads to blue chips.
The most important and difficult to define in the post-bubble period are the sensitive features of the behavior of crazy investors.
But over the past two and a half years, we've undoubtedly seen frenzied investor behavior -- even more than in 2000 -- especially in meme stocks. A collective term for stocks favored by retail traders) and NEV-related stocks, cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
The super-bubble running through its various stages has been completed, and the frantic stomping could begin at any time.
This time the super bubble, similar to Japan in the 1980s, is a superposition of multiple bubbles including the stock market and real estate, which is extremely dangerous.
When pessimism returns to the market, the United States will see the largest disappearance of wealth in history.
Definition of Foam and Super Foam:
We have always defined investment bubbles by a statistical measure of extreme values—deviations from trend by 2 standard deviations.
For a random, normally distributed series, such as a coin toss, a 2 standard deviation event should occur every 44 trials.
This definition may seem arbitrary, but it is reasonable.
But in real life, because of human irrational behavior, the probability of abnormal events will be higher.
We looked at data for all asset classes in financial history and found more than 300 cases of 2 standard deviations in total.
In developed stock markets, every 2-standard-deviation stock bubble over the past 100 years has resulted in a crash, with stock prices falling back to the pre-bubble trend.
But in extreme cases, the bubble doesn't stop at just 2 standard deviations.
So I define 'super bubble' as 3 standard deviation events.
Again using the coin toss example, this happens once every 100 tosses, but in real life it can happen two to three times more often than that.
The U.S. has had three super-bubbles in the past 100 years: stocks in 1929 and 2000, and real estate in 2006.
Also, the Japanese stock and real estate markets in the late 1980s were the same.
We humans are really crazy!
We calculate that the trend value of the S&P 500 is about 2,500 points, and the current S&P 500 index is 4,700 points, which also means that the decline of the S&P 500 may reach 45%.
The harm of multiple asset bubbles at the same time
Japan's history 40 years ago made one thing clear: While stock bubbles are dangerous, real estate bubbles are even more dangerous.
If both happen at the same time, it could be a disaster.
The bursting of Japan's stock market and housing bubbles 40 years ago still affects the country today.
Until now, neither the Japanese stock market nor the real estate market have recovered to their 1989 peaks.
Now, for the first time in U.S. history, multiple asset bubbles are happening in the United States at the same time.
First, the U.S. housing bubble is unprecedented.
The ratio of the median home price to the median household income in the U.S. is at an all-time high today.
In 2021, U.S. home prices will increase by more than 20%, even more than in 2006.
Second, the behavior of investors in U.S. stocks is more frenetic and extreme.
They believe the stock market will go up forever, so they keep buying and buying.
This is the mindset of a typical bubble participant.
Interestingly, in other developed countries, where house prices are also rising, the stock market is lagging behind the US.
Third, US bond prices are also significantly higher than other major countries in the world, and bond interest rates are also the lowest in history.
Fourth, commodity prices, including oil and important metals, are also above trend.
Finally, the global food price index released by the United Nations is close to an all-time high.
High commodity prices will push up inflation and hurt real incomes.
Looking back at 2008, commodity prices rose and asset price bubbles burst, which would eventually cause major economic losses.
We should know that when these foams gather at the same time, the impact force will be several times that of a single foam.
In 2007, the direct damage caused by the bursting of the US housing bubble was $10 trillion, or half the GDP of the US.
But at the time, the bond market only had a bubble in the price of junk bonds, not the stock market.
And when the housing bubble burst, both stock and bond markets took a hit.
Even though multiple asset price bubbles are starting to happen at the same time, the Fed is not really paying attention.
How it happened: Will the Fed never learn?
Looking back at history, there have been several major asset bubbles in the United States in the past 25 years, which is not normal.
I don't think it's a matter of luck, it's a matter of the dovish Fed chairs since Volcker.
Not only do they tolerate these bubbles, they even let them go.
Greenspan, for example.
I've always questioned his ability, both in office and now.
In the late 1990s, he was the biggest driver behind the biggest stock bubble in the U.S. stock market to date.
After the bubble burst, the US economy paid a heavy price.
His successor, Bernanke, deserves a lesson.
He should have been aware of the U.S. housing bubble ahead of time, but he didn't.
At that time, in the face of the apparent super-bubble phenomenon of US real estate, Bernanke insisted that 'the US housing market only reflects the strong fundamentals of the US economy' and that 'the US housing market never collapsed'.
His message was unspoken, but it was clear: 'House prices will never fall because there is no bubble and there can never be one.
'
From a purely statistical point of view, he might be right: the U.S. housing market did not have bubbles in the past.
Because the ups and downs of the property market in various places are not completely uniform, overall, the statistics are normal.
But after Greenspan and Bernanke's relay easing, eventually, the entire country's real estate market began to rise in unison.
If the two chairs don't spot the problem, what about the Fed's statistics-savvy economists?
Didn't they find the problem?
I think there are two explanations, either their academic level is faulty, or they are a career risk of being a naysayer: don't provide information that your boss doesn't want to hear.
Therefore, they finally chose silence.
Thus, this unprecedented and apparently 'non-existent' housing bubble finally burst and reverted to the trends that existed before the bubble.
The bursting of the U.S. housing superbubble ended up causing severe economic damage to the U.S. and global economies.
Thus, for the second time, the Fed became the 'accomplice' of the super bubble.
And this time, the pain has been exacerbated by the bursting of the housing bubble, the associated mortgage mess, and the ensuing drop in U.S. stocks -- just overvalued prices, not bubbles.
Ultimately, the housing crisis led to a recession across the economy and unprecedented bailouts for major financial institutions.
After the crisis, Bernanke and Paulson excelled in lobbying for congressional bailouts, etc., but overall, the Fed has been at the helm of a vast economy. , recklessly let the economy zip through dangerous waters and ignore the risk of icebergs.
After the ship hit the rocks, the captain should have been punished and even tried.
Instead, after the ship sank, the captain was rewarded for helping women and children aboard the lifeboats.
Under Greenspan, he continued to ease regulations on financial institutions.
It is these financial institutions that spawned the real estate super-bubble.
Compared to the stock market bubble of 2000, this real estate bubble is bigger and has more serious consequences.
The Fed should have learned from the super-bubbles of the past few decades and prevented them from happening in advance.
But unfortunately, the Fed did not do this.
We are content with more lifeboats than avoiding icebergs.
We forgive and forget incompetence, or even punish them for their outright malfeasance.
(Iceland, population 300,000, 26 bankers sent to prison; USA, population 300,000, number of bankers in prison, zero)
Bubbles, Growth and Inequality
The long-term downside of asset bubbles is rising inequality: if you want to participate in rising asset prices, you need to own some assets, while the average person, a quarter of the population, has nothing.
By contrast, the top 1% own more than one-third of the nation's assets.
We find that the level of inequality in the United States has deteriorated rapidly since 1997, and is now the most unequal of all rich countries.
Even more shocking is that the entire country has the lowest level of economic mobility, even worse than the UK.
A few decades ago, Britain was the object of our ridicule because of its social and economic rigidity.
The immediate consequence of rising inequality is a reduction in consumption by the masses.
In terms of marginal effects, rich people don't increase their consumption much when they become richer, but for ordinary people, they do not consume all the increased income.
After the housing bubble burst in 2008, the government and the Federal Reserve rolled out record bailouts.
The same is true after the outbreak of the new crown epidemic crisis.
But all this will have consequences.
And this time it was the most dangerous asset price surge in financial history.
At some point in the future, when pessimism erupts, asset price declines are inevitable.
If the prices of all these assets fell by a third, the total wealth loss would be $35 trillion in the United States alone.
If this negative wealth and income effect is combined with inflationary pressures from shortages of energy, food and other goods, we will have serious economic problems.
The last moments of the super bubble
The penultimate phase of a superbubble is characterized by a 'blow-off'—an increase in stock prices that accelerates to two to three times the pre-bull market average.
The previous super bubbles in history are no different.
As for wild speculation, a lot of unusual things have happened since 2020:
1. Crazy meme stocks, including GME and AMC.
These are two companies with mediocre fundamentals, but they have rallied 120 times and 38 times, respectively, from their post-COVID-19 lows to their 2021 highs, driven by stock forum user sentiment.
At one point, GME's market capitalization accounted for 20% of the entire Russell 2000 index.
2. The cryptocurrency Dogecoin has risen nearly 300x to a $90 billion market cap, just because Elon Musk has been joking.
3. Hertz (Translator's Note: a large US rental car company) announced that it will buy Tesla's fleet of shares soared rapidly.
Most of these events are now a thing of the past, and people have grown numb to the thrill over the past six months.
GME, AMC, Dogecoin and more than a third of Nasdaq stocks are now down more than 50% from their highs, with Bitcoin down 50%.
A company I am optimistic about making power lithium batteries, Quantumscape, once surpassed General Motors in market value.
But now, its shares have fallen 83%.
vampire death
At this very moment, we are in the bull market vampire phase: you throw everything you have at it, you fuel it with Covid-19, you suppress it with the end of quantitative easing and the promise of higher interest rates, you use unexpected currencies Inflation poisoned it, but it didn't work, the index was still going up.
These routines have always driven down P/E ratios in the past, but this time they may not.
Just like in the second half of 2007, the real estate mortgage problem was exposed and financial institutions exploded one after another, but the bull market was still hobbling forward, and the market thought that the rise was eternal.
But in the end, the result was no surprise.
Conclusion: what to do as an investor?
GMO's recommendation is to try to avoid U.S. equities, but we are bullish on value stocks in emerging markets and several developed countries, especially Japan.
Personally, I also like some flexible cash, some inflation-proof commodities, and a little bit of gold and silver.
For cryptocurrencies, I feel this is the contemporary 'Emperor's New Clothes'.
I felt more and more like a boy watching the naked emperor pass by.
So many important people and institutions are appreciating the incredible coat of cryptocurrency that is so technically sophisticated and superior that the average person simply cannot understand it and must wear it with trust.
I will not.
In this situation, I have learned to prefer avoidance rather than trust.