Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

Emperor Soros’s new clothes

Matthew Lynn says hedge-fund pioneer and currency speculator George Soros is still a brilliant player of markets — but as a philosopher, frankly, he’s incomprehensible

Matthew Lynn says hedge-fund pioneer and currency speculator George Soros is still a brilliant player of markets — but as a philosopher, frankly, he’s incomprehensible

If nothing else, three decades as one of the world’s most successful speculators has taught George Soros how to pitch a book. While the main title of his latest work, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, might not be the kind of thing to get Waterstone’s managers clearing their shelves, its subtitle — The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means — makes it bang up to date. Even better, Soros rushed it out as a digital download within days of the final words being penned. The implication was that the world couldn’t possibly wait until 19 May — when the print version published by PublicAffairs is released — to find out what Soros made of the credit crunch.

The hedge-fund billionaire, still best know for his role in forcing the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, immediately hit the television studios to frighten everyone. The ‘super-boom’ that had lasted since the end of the second world war is now over, he told the BBC. Britain, like the US, is heading for a full-blown recession. The City and Wall Street will have to ‘shrink’ as banks retrench. ‘The whole world is facing a very serious financial crisis… the most serious financial crisis of our lifetime.’ A quarter-century-long ‘super-bubble’ was finally bursting, he told the New York Times.

And yet, download the book itself and it turns out not to be about any of those things at all. Anyone wondering if they should sell their Credit Suisse shares and stash gold bars under the floorboards instead will come away little the wiser. ‘Near panic conditions prevail in the financial markets,’ he writes.

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Matthew Lynn
Written by
Matthew Lynn
Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author of ‘Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis’ and ‘The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031’

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