Jeremy Grantham recently released his quarterly letter to GMO clients.
Titled On The Road To Zero Growth, the note was pretty depressing.
Grantham sees real US GDP growth trending at 0.9 percent through 2030, then falling to 0.4 percent from 2030 to 2050.
Click Here To See How Grantham Got Those Numbers >
"Someday, when the debt is repaid and housing is normal and Europe has settled down, most business people seem to expect a recovery back to America’s old 3.4% a year growth trend, or at least something close," he wrote. "They should not hold their breath.
"A declining growth trend is inevitable and permanent and is caused by some pretty basic forces."
Those basic forces include unfavorable demographic trends, decelerating productivity growth, tightening resource constraints, and rising environmental costs.
These are trends that have been developing for years. However, they have gone unnoticed thanks to the tech, housing, and financial booms and busts of the last ten or so years.
We pulled the key charts and stats from Grantham's note which help illuminate his thesis.
Let's start with demographics
Growth in the working age population has been falling rapidly
Hours worked per worker is also falling
"It really seems to be part of our global culture today to work less as we get richer. And why not? It is so durable a trend that in the U.S. even after 1970, despite there being no further gains at all in real wages per hour, hours worked continued to creep down at 3 hours a year. Other developed countries, which did quite a bit better in average wages, not surprisingly fell quite a bit faster at over 7 hours a year. Lucky them. (From 1950 this effect has reduced potential growth in the U.S. by 0.17% a year and in the balance of the O.E.C.D. [not shown] by over twice that at 0.4%)."
Source: GMO
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
Please follow Money Game on Twitter and Facebook.