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The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means | 
 enlarge | Author: George Soros
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $13.61
You Save: $9.34 (41%)
New (38) Used (15) from $11.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 705
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 1586486837
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.0973
EAN: 9781586486839
ASIN: 1586486837
Publication Date: May 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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Product Description
In the midst of the most serious financial upheaval since the Great Depression, legendary financier George Soros explores the origins of the crisis and its implications for the future. Soros, whose breadth of experience in financial markets is unrivaled, places the current crisis in the context of decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity. “This is the worst financial crisis since the 1930s,” writes Soros in characterizing the scale of financial distress spreading across Wall Street and other financial centers around the world. In a concise essay that combines practical insight with philosophical depth, Soros makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great credit crisis and its implications for our nation and the world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 Buy it. September 1, 2008
This book will take you a long way in understanding what just happened in the financial markets and with the housing bust.
Whether or not you want to buy Soro's theory of 'reflexivity' as 'the new paradigm' is up to you, but he does make the simple and accurate point that any economic theory that had human beings objectively describing the world and then making decisions based on that 'accurate' intelligence is a silly theory.
Market fundamentals? Those are actually our perception of market fundamentals, so if we delude ourselves about those fundamentals(housing prices will never come down, the dow is going to 30,000) then we mis-take the markets. And people can be delusional as all hell if you haven't noticed. It just keeps on happening...
Soros describes bubbling phenomena with his 'far-from-equilibrium' theory. He gives an 8-stage descriptive theory of bubbles (pg. 65-66) that is, in and of itself, enough reason to buy this book. Look at gold in the 1970s...it followed the exact pattern.
This text advanced my understanding of how markets work and why it is that human idiocy is such an important variable. George wants to explain how this idiocy can actually drive a market, and I appreciate the attempt.
Soros also lets his political opinions be known, but so what. You don't have to agree with him.
Awesome outline August 31, 2008
A good summary of Who's Soros and what's his take for the market--past and future. Most helpful is his insight on the big picture, which could lead to good investment ideas even if he doesn't provide any specific tip.
 Practical insights and new rules from George Soros August 14, 2008
Legendary financier George Soros is worried. The financial markets face the worst credit crisis since the Depression and their existing paradigm needs to be replaced. The new paradigm Soros recommends is based on what he calls the "theory of reflexivity." This book-length essay provides a crash course in the billionaire investor's philosophy and view of financial markets, the origins and consequences of the current credit crunch, the boom-bust model and the behavior of market participants. Soros intersperses his market analysis with enough personal details from his early life and career to keep the book lively. He is also quite vocal in his political beliefs; Democrats will probably appreciate the case he makes against President George W. Bush's administration and its policies. One weakness of the book, other than its repetitiveness as Soros explains his theory, is that he relies heavily on technical and financial jargon, which makes it tough to penetrate and may prove a barrier to some readers. Ironically, he seems to be fully aware of this shortcoming when he writes that readers may find one of his particularly theoretical chapters to be "somewhat repetitive and hard-going." Nevertheless, his warm personal voice and the depth of his financial experience, which spans more than half a decade, is hard to match. Thus, getAbstract notes that this book has much to offer executives, investors, and students of financial markets and theory. (As is true of every Abstract, the following views are those of the author and not of getAbstract.)
 Amateur philosophy by a speculator whose success has gone to his head August 10, 2008
The core idea of this book is a concept that Soros calls "reflexivity". He describes this concept as "a two way connection between participants' thinking and the situation in which they participate." Reflexivity in the financial markets, according to Soros, leads to "an element of uncertainty in the course of events that is absent from natural phenomena."
What Soros fails to explain is why the uncertainties caused by reflexivity are special and need to be treated differently from other uncertainties in the financial markets (and in life) that we take for granted. No one believes that financial markets behave deterministically. Much of the activitiy in the financial world aims at measuring and allocating risks of all sorts, including those that arise from behavior that is widely acknowledged as psychologically driven.
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets (Soros)
Thus, despite claiming a philosophical advance that he implies is on a par with those of Karl Popper and Emmanuel Kant, Soros has a hard time offering up any suggestions for improvement upon current approaches to risk management or regulation. He does offer some specific policy prescriptions, but most of these are narrow proposals for dealing with the 2008 credit crisis, and none are particularly original. For the most part, he resorts to vague suggestions such as that credit creation must be regulated more strictly (but how, exactly?).
Amusingly, at the end of a book whose core thesis is that there are intractable uncertainties in financial markets, Soros provides a journal of his investment decisions at the beginning of 2008 beginning which he starts by making, with great confidence, specific predictions about market direction (so much for reflexivity??). In last journal entry, he goes on the record as having lost money on his bets.
The bottom line: having been a successful speculator some years ago does not make one qualified to pontificate on the nature of the human condition of the limitations of knowledge.
 No Holy Grail August 8, 2008
Having read all of the Soros books I would say this is less convoluted and less disappointing than most. If you are looking for concrete investment ideas prepare to be let down. Interesting discussion of markets and the current crisis in particular-as the title suggests Soros is bearish and not without good reason. Only time will tell if he got it right this time.
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