So says Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of Boston-based investment firm Grantham, Mayo and Van Otterloo, now known as GMO. Some call him the philosopher king of Wall Street because of his highly insightful views on markets and the economy, usually with a longer-term perspective. In a profession of touts, fast-buck and scam artists, Grantham's commentaries are notably refreshing. They're detailed, scholarly, sober, clear and especially important at a time of unparalleled excesses, great economic uncertainty, voices ranging from gloom and doom to blue skies and all clear ahead, so who knows what to believe. Few people sort things out better than he, and whether right or wrong, he makes consummate sense and should be taken seriously.

He calls his latest commentary "Immoral Hazard" and takes straight aim at the perpetrators. It's not the first time, and with good reason. Bad policy yields bad results with former Fed Chairman Greenspan Exhibit A.

Grantham notes:
"It's not that the former Fed boss...was incompetent that is remarkable. (It's that even now) so many people (still) don't seem to get it." Do they "just believe high-quality, self-justifying blarney?" Or do they think top jobs ipso facto "attract great talent by divine right?"



Often, the most important jobs get "mediocrities" like Greenspan and the current White House occupant. Even worse, Washington is infested with them.

Grantham first learned of Greenspan in the late 1960s when he headed economic consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan & Co. Even then, his assessment was unsparing: "To be brutally honest, he was considered run of the mill by anyone I knew then or have met later who knew" of his work. Consider his "famous" January 1973 call that "it is rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you now can." It was right at the start of a punishing recession and 60% two-year market decline in real terms, second only at the time to the 1929 crash.

Never one to equivocate, Grantham cuts to the chase and draws blood: Greenspan's call "was one of the first of a long line of terrible prognostications for which he has remarkably 'not' been..