George Soros Quotes

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

Market prices are always wrong in the sense that they present a biased view of the future.

The generally accepted view is that markets are always right -- that is, market prices tend to discount future developments accurately even when it is unclear what those developments are. I start with the opposite view. I believe the market prices are always wrong in the sense that they present a biased view of the future.

In an efficient market, at any point in time, the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value.

I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.

I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information.

The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn't true.

The markets are efficient over time.

Market timing doesn't work. If all the bubbles and all this mispricing really exist, how come so few people see it before it turns out that way?

Economists often get the market wrong.

To establish the right price for a stock, the market must have adequate information, but it by no means follows that is the market has this information it will thereupon establish the right price.

Arbitrage human nature. It's not going to change any time soon.

Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets.

It seems to me that at least as far as the financial markets are concerned, there is increasing evidence against rational expectations, even at the macro level.

'Perfect competition' is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand.

Arbitrage proof has since been widely used throughout finance and economics.

If you believe that markets operate in Alan Greenspan fashion, then you don't inquire into the details.

The proposition is that prices reflect all available information, which in simple terms means since prices reflect all available information, there's no way to beat the market.

Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught

How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?

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

I've always believed that a speculative bubble need not lead to a recession, as long as interest rates are cut quickly enough to stimulate alternative investments. But I had to face the fact that speculative bubbles usually are followed by recessions. My excuse has been that this was because the policy makers moved too slowly - that central banks were typically too slow to cut interest rates in the face of a burst bubble, giving the downturn time to build up a lot of momentum.

That invisible hand of Adam Smith seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people.

You're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That's value investing.

The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.