Seth Klarman on lessons learned from the 2008 crisis

Most of us learned about the Great Depression from our parents or grandparents who developed a “Depressionmentality,” by which for decades people shunned leverage, embraced thrift, and thought twice before quitting their secure jobs to join risky ventures.  By bailing out the economy rather than allowing the pain of the economic and market collapses to be felt, the government has endowed our generation with a “really-bad-couple-of-weeks-mentality”: no lasting lessons are learned; the government endlessly intervenes in the economy, and, ironically, the first thing to strongly rebound from the 2008 collapse isn’t jobs or economic activity but speculation.

Benjamin Graham’s margin-of-safety concept – to invest at a sufficient discount so that even bad luck or the vicissitudes of the business cycle won’t derail an investment – is applicable to the economy as a whole.  Bridges intended for ten-ton trucks are overbuilt by engineers to hold vehicles of 30 tons.  Responsible investors assume their best judgments will sometimes go awry and insist on bargain purchases that allow room for error.  Likewise, an economy built with no margin of safety will eventually implode.  Governments that run huge deficits, promise entitlements that will be next-to impossible to deliver, and depend on the beneficence of foreigners to stay afloat inevitably must collapse – perhaps not imminently but eventually, as Greece and Ireland have recently discovered.

It is clear, both in the financial markets and in government policy, that no long-term lessons have been drawn from the events of 2008.  A friend recently posited that adversity is valuable not for what it teaches but for what it reveals.  The current episode of financial adversity reveals some unpleasant truths about the character and will of our country and its leaders, and offers an unpleasant picture of the future that awaits, unless we quickly find a way to change course.

~ Seth Klarman, founder, Baupost Group, investor letter, 2010