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 enlarge | Author: George Soros
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $12.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  56 reviews
Sales Rank: 303
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.4 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
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| Customer Reviews:
 liberal view of a catastrophe October 20, 2008
1 out of 12 found this review helpful
As stated in the review title...if you have liberal political views then this book is for you! If not, skip it and go for something a little more middle of the road.
 Leverage, Complex Products, Massive Deception October 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Legendary investor George Soros explains a wide variety of market upheavals over several decades. Although this book was published in May, he identified the problems that would cause a liquidity crunch and capital shortfalls for Wall Street's former investment banks, now part of the banking system. He identifies too much leverage contributing to the housing bubble and lack of regulation as key problems. I am a quant trader and also recommend Janet Tavakoli's new book, Structured Finance and Collateralized Debt Obligations: New Developments in Cash and Synthetic Securitization (Wiley Finance)(for market professionals) which covers the flawed evolution and lack of regulation of leveraged products including asset backed (home equity) CDO's, SIVs, and credit derivatives. Short hedge funds made billions. The securities were overvalued partly due to market euphoria, as Soros theorizes (reflexivity), but also due to some dealing from the bottom of the deck by investment banks putting together packages of assets, which led to lack of trust about the asset values. Soros could have made a stronger case for more effective regulation, but he makes his strongest case for government intervention. It has been done in the past, and it seems much more is needed this time due to the massive scale of the problem.
 Huge Mountain of Moose Manure October 15, 2008
8 out of 24 found this review helpful
I have lost patience for this kind of book. I recommend the other ten books instead (and the last two, which I wrote, are free online, so I am not pushing them for purchase)
1) Our economy went into the gutter when Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), then Chair for Banking, slipped a 200+ page bill written by lobbyists into a must fund larger bill, with the result that no senators read it (as they did not read the Patriot Act), and it deregulated--completely--the financial marketplace, ending the walls between banking (which lends on tangibles) and investment (which speculates on intangibles).
2) DERIVATIVES is code for fantasy cash. I was not smart enough to see this myself, but Bogle, Soros, Buffet, Perot, Nader, they all saw it, they tried to brief it, and in the case of Nader, got laughed off the Hill. Sub-prime mortgages were the match that lit the fire, not the straw itself.
3) Goldman Sachs is forever, Washington's two criminal parties have been bought and paid for. Rubin did not bail out Mexico. He bailed out Wall Street's bad investments in Mexico. and Bill Clinton for sure understood this, and leveraged the whole thing the whole time with placement of his friends in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae where they enriched themselves and contributed heavily to Clinton's Library and other endeavors.
The market did not fail. Congress failed. BOTH parties are criminal parties, and I am personally outraged that Americans are not burning tires in the streets demanding that at a minimum three other parties be heard by the public in these debates. Most of America is utterly clueless about the FACT that the League of Women Voters was replaced by a Republican-Democratic Presidential Debate Commission precisely to exclude Independent, Green, Reform, Libertarian, and other candidates.
With all due respect for their accomplishments, the two candidates for President today are relative puppets being managed by *clowns* who are owned by Wall Street carpetbaggers and the crooked parties that have effectively killed democracy in this once-great Republic.
I am, to be utterly candid, sick and tired of Soros telling us how smart he is when he actually does not care at all about the public interest. This is the last book written by Soros that I will waste my time on.
Other much more relevant books to our situation:
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
The Informant: A True Story
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)
I am ANGRY. Soros is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Simiarly, Buffet means well, but he is working this for himself, not us. It was idiocy to approve the bail-out. That should have been a freeze, a moratorium on all foreclosures (10,000 a day) as well as all evictions, a capping of interest at 10%, an emergency fund focusing on INDIVIDUALS, and a mandated public forum post-election with ALL relevant documents posted online for scrutiny ("put enough eyeballs on it, no bug is invisible").
This election is so fraught with fraud on so many levels, that the financial crisis, in my judgement is the third and least of our problems. Electoral fraud and the criminal misbehavior of BOTH Republicans and Democrats is problem #1. The two dozen plus secessionist movements being led by Kirkpatrick Sale are problem #2 because they have LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES. I was reflecting on this today, and realized that an honest man today has three choices:
1. Refuse to support our dysfunctional government and support secession.
2. Join a crime family and drop out of the fraudulent "legal" economy.
3. Be a gerbil, a farm animal, and let Wall Street--including the author of this book--enjoy life on our backs for a few more years.
I did not read this book, nor buy it. I do not do this often, but this seems as good a place to denounce Soros, the horse that brought him (Wall Street), and the morons in Congress that let these thieves run wild.
I expect plenty of reflexive negative votes but for those of you with an open mind, take the time to read the varied reviews of the ten books I recommend instead of this one, and trust your own judgment.
Mark Lewis had it right: these folks think nothing of "exploding the client." That's us. This author was right up there with them, step by step, and did nothing for We the People--his best shot was to support the "least evil" (in his mind) party and to be silent as Bush-Cheney destroyed our military, our economy, and most grieviously, our global moral standing.
It's time we drop kick Wall Street into the ocean, introduce Open Money, and invest only in local tangible hard-money options. Ron Paul has it right--everyone else is a traitor to the Constitution and to the Republic--Paulson means well but he and all of these folks live in a "closed society" that is completely out of touch with OUR reality.
A new paradigm for egotism October 14, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I respect George Soros' talents as an investor. As an author, he falls short. This book was as much about his need for credit for a personal theory as it was a real discussion of financial markets. I would not recommend this book. Shiller, Morris, and El Erian have written much better books about the current events relating to the financial crisis.
 Philosophy and Finance October 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is very much like Soros's other books: a mix of (his own) Philosophy in PART I, and its possible applicability to the Finance markets of the time in PART II.
If you like Taleb's mix of Philosophy and Finance in Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable then you'll Soros's approach.
If you're looking to emulate Soros's success, this book doesn't tell you how to do this in concrete steps. The theory of reflexivity explains the nature of financial markets (the problem) but doesn't give a solution.
Tony Loton, author --
DON'T LOSE MONEY! (in the Stock Markets)
Financial Trading Patterns
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