“The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behaviour, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.”
Thus did Jeremy Grantham, legendary investor and co-founder of GMO asset management, greet the new year. Is he right and how much would it matter to the world if he were?
We can indeed, as Grantham told the FT, observe classic symptoms of mania: the rise of amateur traders, frenzied interest in once obscure companies, soaring prices of speculative assets such as bitcoin and hot businesses like Tesla,and the emergence of special purpose acquisition companies, or Spacs. These are vehicles for the acquisition of unlisted companies and so a way around initial public offering rules. They are modern versions on a vastly bigger scale of the company allegedly created during the early 18th century’s South Sea bubble, “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is”. That bubble ended badly. Will this time be different?