Sir John Templeton's 2003 Prediction: U.S. Housing Prices Will Fall by 90%
John Templeton was one of the great investors of the twentieth century. He began in 1937. He made billions of dollars for his clients. He created a family of mutual funds that consistently outperformed the stock market. Then, at age 80, he sold his companies for $440 million. That was in 1992.
He now does what very few extremely rich men ever do: he is giving away his fortune, to the tune of $40 million a year. The general rule is this: "Rich men know how to make money. They don't know how to give it away." This aphorism does not apply to Templeton.
In 1972, he created up the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He gives away a million dollars each year to one winner. I have known two of them personally. Based on their achievements, they both deserved the money, and they both proved this by giving the award money away.
Templeton was the perfect investor for his era, which began in the Great Depression. He is very smart. He graduated at the top of his class at Yale University and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He looked around him in 1937, and he saw enormous pessimism. He bought low, and later sold high. Here's how, according to his Web site:
