George Soros Quotes

I don't think that hedge funds are bad per se. I think they're just one more financial tool. And in that sense, they're useful.

One should never risk one's whole fortune unless supported by one's entire forces.

The banks, because of mismanagement, because of huge risk taking, are now in very vulnerable positions. We can expect that we're gonna have to do more to shore up the financial system. We also are gonna have to make sure that we set up financial regulations so that not only does this never happen again, but you start having some sort of - trust in how the credit markets work again.

We now have power under the Dodd-Frank legislation to break up banks. And I've said I will use that power if they pose a systemic risk.

Essentially, not only do we believe in this myth of 'de-risking', but it has become the one overriding goal; de-risking above growth, de-risking above innovation, de-risking above everything else. And we've reached the point where the Fed is using $70 Billion a month to 'de-risk' a largely insolvent banking system. And this can only end badly. The idea that you can do capitalism without risk is ridiculous on its face.

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought.

The best approach here, if at all possible, is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset-price bubble bursts in the future.

When you have risk aversion in Japan, the normal day-to-day outflows that happen in a normal market environment slow down.

Nobody ever lost money taking a profit.

Hedge funds try to produce above-average investment returns using tactics ranging from traditional stock-picking to complex derivative and arbitrage plays. High minimum investments, redemption restrictions and aggressive strategies make them suitable mainly for more sophisticated and well-heeled investors.

Portfolio theory, as used by most financial planners, recommends that you diversify with a balance of stocks and bonds and cash that's suitable to your risk tolerance.

Banks need to continue to lend to creditworthy borrowers to earn a profit and remain strong.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

We want to be a secure investment, a little bit like a bond.

Improving oversight of hedge funds and other private funds is vital to their sustainability and to our economy's stability.

What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.

I'm afraid sometimes certain individual cases of defaults are unavoidable. What we should do is to step up monitoring, properly handle relevant matters, and ensure there is no regional and systemic financial risk.

We need to increase the transparency of shadow banking markets so that authorities can monitor for signs of excessive leverage and unstable maturity transformation outside regulated banks.

In the financial system we have today, with less risk concentrated in banks, the probability of systemic financial crises may be lower than in traditional bank-centered financial systems.

I've got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities. I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary.

If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system.

Like air traffic, the free movement of capital needs controls.

Unregulated derivatives like credit default swaps threaten our regulated markets, or indeed our economy without any Federal agency knowing about it.

I think people have to be very careful with new ideas [in fiancé and economics]. What you need to worry about is when you have something that’s a really good idea, but you get too much of it too fast, like over-the-counter derivatives.

Compelling large banks to hold more capital reduces their risk of failure, but as the last financial crisis [the Meltdown of 2008] demonstrated, during a wide-spread panic, investors and lenders lose all faith in the values banks have assigned to their assets, and many mistrust the banks that claim to have enough capital.