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Exhibit 11: Pillars of the Investment Strategy Group’s Investment Philosophy
INVESTMENT STRATEGY GROUP
History is a Appropriate Value Appropriate 4
Useful Guide Diversification Orientation Horizon mesistency
ANALYTICAL RIGOR
ASSET ALLOCATION PROCESS IS CLIENT-TAILORED AND INDEPENDENT OF IMPLEMENTATION VEHICLES
series, movies). Combined with some smaller
improvements, these changes added $560 billion to
the level of 2012 GDP, a 3.6% increase relative to
the prior estimate.
The more immediate—and important—
question is whether we have entered a new phase
in productivity growth trends that will keep
productivity growth at the low levels seen since
2004. We believe that the answer is unknowable
with any degree of certainty; historically,
productivity forecasts have been notoriously
wrong. In The Age of Diminished Expectations,**
first published in 1990, Paul Krugman, Nobel
laureate in economics and professor at City
University of New York, wrote that the lower pace
of productivity growth experienced since the early
1970s would most likely persist in the future. In
1995, however, productivity growth rates increased
and were more than double the rate of the prior
12-year period.
Similarly, in 1997, the Congressional Budget
Office estimated that the long-run average annual
growth rate of labor productivity would be 1.1%.
Between 1995 and 2004, the actual average annual
growth rate of labor productivity was 3.2%.’
As many of our clients know, one of the pillars
of our investment philosophy is that history
is a useful guide (see Exhibit 11). And history
tells us that labor productivity has moved in
cycles, with periods of low productivity growth
followed by periods of high productivity growth.
In a forthcoming and comprehensive paper
titled “Seven Reasons to Be Optimistic About
Productivity,”?* Professors Lee Branstetter of
Carnegie Mellon University and Daniel Sichel
of Wellesley College show that periods of low
productivity growth have been followed by periods
of high productivity growth since 1889, as seen
in Exhibit 12. There is no reason to believe that
“this time is different”; as many of you also know,
we believe that those words are among the most
dangerous and misused words in our industry.
Olivier Blanchard, senior fellow at the Peterson
Institute for International Economics and former
chief economist at the IMF, has also shown that
the current period of low productivity growth does
not tell us much about future productivity trends.
He states that the correlation of “successive pairs
of five-year averages of total factor productivity
growth is only 0.20” since the mid-1970s.”
Outlook | Investment Strategy Group 13
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