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.