Sunday Economics Reading

For some reason I often find myself delving into an economics article on Sunday mornings. Today offered this piece from Financial Times on George Soros.

Soros is my kind of billionaire financier. (But not, apparently, Paul Krugman's, which kinda says it all for me.) Once dismissed as a "successful speculator" and a "failed philosopher", Soros is all the rage now, having foreseen the current financial crisis, enough to take steps to halt his own risk. In fact, he compares the current situation to the "high adventure" of the time he lived under an assumed name, as a Jewish teenager in Hungary and Russia hiding from capture.

In addition to making a lot of money, Soros has done a lot of good in the world, too, which is more than most financial genuises have in their portfolio. Politically, he was one of the first to spot the potential of one Barack Obama, state senator from Hyde Park.

Perhaps he's psychic, or one of those rare people who have the ability to see the future based on the current reality. The article begins with an account of the day in August, 2007, when Soros invited Wall Street's most influential investors over for lunch to discuss a few troubling indicators of the future credit crunch:

The discussion focused on a single question: was a recession looming? We all know the answer today, but the consensus that overcast afternoon was different. In a memo written after the lunch, Wien, a longtime friend of Soros’s, wrote: “The conclusion was that we were probably in an economic slowdown and a correction in the market, but we were not about to begin a recession or a bear market.” Only two men dissented. One of those was Soros, who finished the meal convinced that the global financial crisis he had been predicting – prematurely – for years had finally begun.

The rest of the story is here, if you too like to read tales torn from the financial pages on a Sunday.