George Soros Quotes

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.

The markets don't like instability and they don't like uncertainty.

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional.

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

Unfettered markets eventually get out of whack.

Every time I get accustomed to low volatility, like we were towards the end of the Greenspan era, and we think we have all the levers under the control... something erupts to remind us that the idea that anybody is in control of everything is hubris.

In certain circumstances, financial markets can affect the so-called fundamentals which they are supposed to reflect. When that happens, markets enter into a state of dynamic disequilibrium and behave quite differently from what would be considered normal by the theory of efficient markets. Such boom/bust sequences do not arise very often, but when they do, they can be very disruptive, exactly because they affect the fundamentals of the economy.

I think we will have continuing danger from these markets and that we will have repeats of the financial crisis - [they] may differ in details but there will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap, over and over, until we learn from experience

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

If you rank the top 50 one-day moves in the S&P 500, a fair number of those happened within the last five or 10 years. That tells you that we're in a different, riskier market now.

These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.

I don't entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating.

We say, 'The market plummets,' like it's some roaring creature.

That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.

Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.

The older I get, the less respect I have for the signals emitted by our vaunted speculative markets.

Financial markets have a tendency to go to excess.

Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.

Markets don't like instability, investors shy away from uncertainty, and consumer confidence goes down in difficult times.

Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years, including recurrent speculative episodes. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that we're now having another one of those speculative episodes.