Jeremy Grantham continues to emit left-wing noises from the right ventricle.
Jeremy Grantham's GMO Capital manages close to $100 billion. You don't normally expect to see people like that saying things like this.
[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000"]Grantham wonders if Marx was right after all
“Capitalism,” he writes, “threatens our existence.”
Already, capitalism is proving that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were at least partially correct. They “looked forward to globalization and the supranational company because they argued it would make capitalism even more powerful, overreaching, and eventually reckless,” Grantham writes.
Globalization “would ... offer the capitalists more rope to hang themselves with ... rope ... bought from briskly competing capitalists, eager till the end for a good deal.”
He says capitalism does almost everything better than any other economic system. It’s just that its two or three main flaws are potentially fatal and have gone largely unaddressed. A sustainable economic system, for instance, can’t be based on ever-increasing debt, corporations can’t be allowed to run governments and loot treasuries, and “growth at any cost” is a recipe for planetary suicide.
The list of "Grantham's finer points" in the article make remarkable reading, offering insight into the thinking of a man who cares about a lot more than just managing money.
His actual quarterly letter from 4Q11 in which he speaks such heresy is here (PDF).
