GMO’s Grantham: We Need a New Marshall Plan

Jeremy Grantham, the co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO, says a new Marshall Plan focused on green infrastructure is the key to reviving a sluggish global economy struggling with the short-term impact of a pandemic and long-term impact of climate change and rising inequality. 

Such a plan, modeled on the U.S. program that helped Western Europe recover from the devastation of World War II, would create good-paying jobs and reduce the impact of climate change, which threatens global growth, writes Grantham in his latest Viewpoints note.

It would also challenge “the growing dominance of China and energy and industrial technology of the next century.” An example of that dominance: China has 400,000 electric buses; the U.S. has 400, according to Grantham. 

“Green energy and industry will be not just economically important in the coming decades, but, like oil was before, incredibly geopolitically important,” writes Grantham, who is also the founder of the Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, which funds research at the Imperial College of London focused on climate change. 

In the U.S. a new Marshall Plan would also address “subpar” infrastructure that has been  suffering from delayed maintenance and growing income inequality that has been masked temporarily by the “short-term explosion” of new, disruptive FAANG-type companies, writes Grantham, referring to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.