George Soros Quotes

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

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

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

The one thing about markets is that they do not give any advance notice. If they did, they would be arbitraged away.

The markets are efficient over time.

Remember that banks aren't markets. The market is amoral. The market doesn't care who you are. You're a trade to the market. The market will sell you if they think you're riskier.

In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.

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.

In the financial markets I find it easy to predict what will happen and very difficult to predict when it will happen. I think that things were clear during the bubble as to what would happen eventually.

A lot of times when I was short, I would create a level of activity beforehand that would drive the futures. . . . It's a fun game.

You can't buck the market.

It is the business of economists, not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles.

Interest rates are to asset prices what gravity is to the apple. When there are low interest rates, there is a very low gravitational pull on asset prices.

It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.

FISHER SEES STOCKS PERMANENTLY HIGH

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.

It is better to have a cat and mouse game where the cat has the upper hand than a cat and mouse game where the mice are ruling. Because the latter means that the market participants are given free range. That was actually the big misconception of our national hero Ronald Reagan, who always talked about the magic of the market.

In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.

But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.

The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.

Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy or elections.

The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.