Jeremy Grantham

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I consider most of the talent in the financial world to be suboptimal. It could be better placed earning its living in the real world.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Equities are boring; bonds are disgusting.