The perma-bear who sees the ice melting

We’re barely ten seconds into our interview when Jeremy Grantham, one-time bedpan salesman from Doncaster, now hugely successful US money manager, is off on a favourite tack — mixing it with his competitors in the investment world. In this case what has drawn his ire are some reported comments from a well-known American fund manager whose views I have alluded to in a recent newspaper column.

‘I’m going to start with an ad hominem remark,’ he announces down the line from Boston, his adopted home, where he has built from scratch a global fund management business that looks after more than $140 billion of other people’s money. The pundit in question, he says, ‘is the biggest historical revisionist around. Everything he said he has predicted is plain wrong…. Every one of his arguments is flat-out wrong.’ Then we’re off on a five-minute discourse on the inadequacies of the said pundit, whose byline has adorned a hundred columns in Forbes magazine. After cataloguing a string of alleged misreasonings, Grantham concludes: ‘I’ve told you everything already about the kind of guy I am. I’m a vindictive son of a bitch who never forgets.’

Grantham left these shores more than 40 years ago to do an MBA at Harvard and never found time to return. ‘By background I’m both a Quaker and a Yorkshireman, which I like to call double jeopardy.’ He means that the spirit of ‘waste not, want not’ and calling a spade a spade is ever present in his life. ‘I cannot even pay for dinner myself. My wife has to pay the check.’ The hardest thing he has ever had to do, he goes on, is to tell his English stepfather that he was not going to carry on flogging bedpans for the latter’s modest hospital supply business, but plough his own path instead.