Glacier Bay Alaska, credit B Girardet

New hero of the eco-lovers and black beast of the traders, Jeremy Grantham, a Wall Street star, has decided to dedicate 98% of his fortune to the ecological cause.

Jeremy Grantham is a financial legend. The Englishman, who has been living in the United States for some 40 years, is known for his flair. He identifies crises for miles around and has managed to inflate his clients accounts. Today, it is the ecological crisis that worries him. Interviewed by Les Echos Week-end at the end of August, he confided: “Men have an incredible ability to self-destruct. (…) It’s impressive to see how people are not afraid of the frightening things that might happen to them.”

That’s why the founder of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), an investment management company with more than $100 billion in assets, decided to dedicate 98% of his assets to the environmental cause, or about $1 billion. This is a rare or even unprecedented approach in the financial world, where the wealthy generally only give up their money after their death, and only in part.

However, it was not for lack of trying to rally the billionaires to his cause. But Jeremy Grantham deplores the fact that, even when they make philanthropic donations, few people are interested in the environmental cause (only 2%).

“To put your name on the gable of a museum or school, there are people there! (…) When it comes to financing green projects, however, billionaires hide.”

Yet the visionary is sure: the old economy, based on oil, is on the verge of implosion. It is on the new one, the one based on green energies, that we must now invest. And those who anticipate this changeover will be the big winners.

“My bet will pay off in the long run. The environmental risk is the only one that has a 100% chance of happening. And paradoxically, it’s the only one Wall Street doesn’t care about! (…) The decarbonization of the economy will bring fortunes to those who bet on it. A paradigm shift is taking place, perhaps the most important economic event since the industrial revolution.”

For years, he has been supporting many green startups like QuantumScape, which aims to revolutionize batteries. At the same time, it is investing massively in lithium and copper, two essential values of tomorrow’s economy. More surprisingly, he was also involved in the field, as in a sit-in outside the White House where he was protesting against the construction of an oil pipeline between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico.

Source (our translation) https://positivr.fr/jeremy-grantham-la-legende-de-wall-str…/