Soros: Failure of Market Fundamentalism

This is an overview of George Soros the 35th richest man in the world and considered one of the most successful investors. He had a change of heart and started to question his own beliefs, as a result he started the Open Society Institute to challenge current thinking and to encourage openness and new ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros

George Soros (Hungarian: Soros György; pronounced /ˈsɔroʊs/ or /ˈsɔrəs/,[2] Hungarian: [ˈʃoroʃ]; born August 12, 1930, as Schwartz György) is a Hungarian-American financier, businessman and notable philanthropist focused on supporting liberal ideals and causes.[3] He became known as “the Man Who Broke the Bank of England” after he made a reported $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crises.[4][5] Soros correctly speculated that the British government would have to devalue the pound sterling.[6]

Soros is Chairman of the Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. He played a significant role in the peaceful transition from communism to capitalism in Hungary (1984–89)[5] and provided Europe’s largest-ever higher education endowment to Central European University in Budapest.[7] Later, the Open Society Institute’s programs in Georgia were considered by Russian and Western observers to have been crucial in the success of the Rose Revolution. In the United States, he is known for donating large sums of money in an effort to defeat President George W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 2004. In 2010, he donated $1 million in support of Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana in the state of California. He was an initial donor to the Center for American Progress, and he continues to support the organization through the Open Society Foundations. The Open Society Institute has active programs in more than 60 countries around the world with total expenditures currently averaging approximately $600 million a year.[8]

In 2003, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker wrote in the foreword of Soros’ book The Alchemy of Finance:

George Soros has made his mark as an enormously successful speculator, wise enough to largely withdraw when still way ahead of the game. The bulk of his enormous winnings is now devoted to encouraging transitional and emerging nations to become ‘open societies,’ open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce but – more important – tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.

His philosophical outlook is influenced by Karl Popper, under whom he studied at the London School of Economics (LSE). His Open Society Institute is named after Popper’s two volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, and Soros’s ongoing philosophical commitment to the principle of fallibilism (that anything he believes may in fact be wrong, and is therefore to be questioned and improved) stems from Popper’s philosophy.

A current example of reflexivity in modern financial markets is that of the debt and equity of housing markets. Lenders began to make more money available to more people in the 1990s to buy houses. More people bought houses with this larger amount of money, thus increasing the prices of these houses. Lenders looked at their balance sheets which not only showed that they had made more loans, but that their equity backing the loans – the value of the houses, had gone up (because more money was chasing the same amount of housing, relatively). Thus they lent out more money because their balance sheets looked good, they were guaranteed by the Federal Government, and prices went up more. This was further amplified by public policy. Many governments see home ownership as a positive outcome and so first home owners grant and other financial subsidies – or influences to buy a home such as the exemption of a primary residence from capital gains taxation – mean that house purchases were seen as a good thing. Prices increased rapidly, and lending standards were relaxed. The salient issue regarding reflexivity is that it explains why markets gyrate over time, and do not just stick to equilibrium – they tend to overshoot or undershoot.[24]

View of potential problems in the free market system

Despite working as an investor and currency speculator, he argues that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries. Soros blames many of the world’s problems on the failures inherent in what he characterizes as market fundamentalism. His opposition to many aspects of globalization has made him a controversial figure.

Victor Niederhoffer said of Soros: “Most of all, George believed even then in a mixed economy, one with a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest.”

Soros claims to draw a distinction between being a participant in the market and working to change the rules that market participants must follow. According to Mahathir bin Mohamed, Prime Minister of Malaysia from July 1981 to October 2003, Soros – as the hedge fund chief of Quantum – may have been partially responsible for the economic crash in 1997 of East Asian markets when the Thai currency relinquished its peg to the US dollar. According to Mahathir, in the three years leading to the crash, Soros invested in short-term speculative investment in East Asian stock markets and real estate, then divested with “indecent haste” at the first signs of currency devaluation.[70] Soros replied, saying that Mahathir was using him “as a scapegoat for his own mistakes”, that Mahathir’s promises to ban currency trading (which Malaysian finance officials hastily retracted) were “a recipe for disaster” and that Mahathir “is a menace to his own country”.[71]

In an interview regarding the late-2000s recession, Soros referred to it as the most serious crisis since the 1930s. According to Soros, market fundamentalism with its assumption that markets will correct themselves with no need for government intervention in financial affairs has been “some kind of an ideological excess”. In Soros’ view, the markets’ moods – a “mood” of the markets being a prevailing bias or optimism/pessimism with which the markets look at reality – “actually can reinforce themselves so that there are these initially self-reinforcing but eventually unsustainable and self-defeating boom/bust sequences or bubbles”.[72]

In reaction to the late-2000s recession he founded the Institute for New Economic Thinking in October 2009. This is a think tank composed of international economic, business and financial experts, mandated to investigate radical new approaches to organising the international economic and financial system.

In 2010, Forbes lists Soros as the Forbes list of billionaires 35th richest person in the world, and the 14th richest person in America, with a net worth estimated at US$14.2 billion.[1] Soros has given away $7 billion to various causes since 1979.[76]