Especially worrisome to Grantham is the gulf between wage earners in the U.S. The top 10% of U.S. workers currently receive about half of the nation's total income, with half of that going to the top 1%. The last time this country saw a wage gap so extreme was just before the 1929 stock-market crash and the Great Depression. By comparison, in the late 1970s the top 1% garnered about 9% of all earnings.
"You can't run the economy on BMWs alone," Grantham said. "If the average person is in a pickle, how do you have a healthy economy?"
For starters, he said, you tax the richest more than they're paying now. Said Grantham: "We have actually made the tax structure friendlier to the top 10%."
Grantham contends that income inequality at these levels takes a real toll on ordinary workers and society as a whole. To bridge this gap and give average workers a bigger slice of the pie, Grantham advocates investing in education, training, and to "change the tax structure to make it equitable."
Value Stocks, Rich Market
Grantham also doesn't approve of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke taking steps that he said essentially have put savers in a box. Keeping interest rates low, and stating that rates will remain in the cellar for at least a couple of years, forces people to take more risk with their money if they want yield and capital appreciation.
"You're transferring money away from retirees" who must either delve into stocks, gold or some other higher-stakes investment, or languish in savings accounts and low-yielding bonds, Grantham said. "They could use that money. They would spend every penny."
Instead, Grantham said the Fed's policy puts money "in the hands of people who aren't spending it — people who only buy BMWs and don't support Wal-Mart." This creates a vicious cycle in which, Grantham said, individual savers are penalized and restrain spending, while the beneficiaries are "bankers and corporations that can build factories all over the place — except they won't because consumption is too weak."
Accordingly, Grantham sees this path coming to no good end over the short-term. He said he expects another leg down for the U.S. stock market, one where shares could stay low-priced for years while U.S. economic growth plods along at maybe 2% annually instead of the relatively more robust historical average of around 3.4%.
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