Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham discussed the dot-com bubble, green investing, and America's poor handling of the pandemic in a recent interview. Here are the 10 best quotes

• British investor Jeremy Grantham reflected on the dot-com bubble, trumpeted green investments, and criticized Americans' response to the pandemic in a RealVision interview released on Monday.
• The chief investment strategist of asset-manager GMO also praised Pfizer's partner BioNTech and Moderna for developing extremely effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time.
• Scroll down to read his 10 best quotes from the interview.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham discussed dot-com fever, the "greening" of the global economy, and the disastrous US response to the coronavirus pandemic in a RealVision interview published on Monday and filmed last week.

The British chief investment strategist of Grantham, Mayo & van Otterloo, who warned of a stock-market bubble earlier this month, also praised Moderna and BioNTech for developing highly effective Covid-19 vaccines in record time.

Here are Grantham's 10 best quotes from the interview, condensed and lightly edited for clarity:

1. "There was something about that tech bubble of 1999 that made the clients talk as if we had personally insulted them, we had deliberately attempted to lose the money."

2. "The reason they were upset is they completely bought into the new golden era that Alan Greenspan and others were talking about, that the internet was going to drive away the dark clouds of ignorance, and productivity would go through the roof and stay there forever."

3. "If you look around today, all the dominant ideas and companies have come out of thin air. None of these guys are spinoffs from the General Electrics and the Procter & Gambles and the IBMs."

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4. "What a testimonial to the power of new thinking, new ideas, and new enterprises" — praising Moderna and Pfizer's partner BioNTech for developing extremely effective coronavirus vaccines despite their limited track records.

5. "The whole of the world is going to be green."

6. "If you invest in the greening of the economy, and we get behind it and we do enough to save our bacon, you will make tons more money than betting on the rest of the economy. If we fail, you are screwed anyway."

7. "In terms of PhDs in physics and chemistry, we have none in all the members of Congress or all the members of the administration. In fact, when they hear the word PhD, they reach for their revolver, it seems."

8. "Not wearing a mask is on the wrong side of rugged individualism and utter selfishness. We are fighting for the right to drive drunk as it were, somehow conflating the idea that personal liberty can allow you to do things like drunken driving that are dangerous to your neighbor, as if it were something like wearing a seatbelt. Be my guest, do not wear a seatbelt. You may die, but that is your problem."

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9. "I do not believe in American exceptionalism, except in one way. In recent decades, the US has been exceptionally bad" — Grantham pointed to a higher murder rate and lower life expectancy than other developed countries. However, he highlighted venture capital, risk-taking, and great research universities in the US as national achievements.

10. "We do not produce any widgets. We shuffle the future stream of claims on those widgets around in a cosmic game of poker" — describing how money managers bet on options and other financial instruments.