Billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros spoke with Judy Woodruff about the financial crisis, inflation, Obama (whom he supports), and more. In the interview from the New York Review of Books, he debunks the myth of pure free market fundamentalism, pointing to the recent bailout of Bear Stearns and the organized assist to Long-Term Capital Management in the late 90s as examples of government intervention in markets.
This blog believes in capitalism and supports free markets. But every gasbag bloviating about unfettered free markets and then crying for the Fed to cut interest rates should read this interview and then take a look at themselves in the mirror.
Friday, January 16, 2009 at 9:10 am |
I recently featured Fareed Zakaria’s interview of Soros which is an interesting discussion of how bubbles form out of misconceptions and how reality sets in and bursts and crashes bubbles.
Unlike other critics like Peter Schiff and Jim Rogers, Soros favors government intervention to regulate markets since he doesn’t believe in the “self-correction to equilibrium” notion of markets.
Soros’ skeptical approach to human prediction of markets is similar to Nassim Taleb’s ideas that history is inherently a fallacy and any prediction based on past data is imperfect at best.