Well his mani point is that markets do not tend towards equilibrium but can be quite extreme in their pricing. I completely agree with this. But do they alwats revert to an equilibrium point? I think so but unfortunately for many it’s like an elastic band. It either rebounds on you causing a sharp pain or actually complete explodes.

This leads us to the greatest maxim of trading and investing: buy low, sell high.

The best traders are those who are completely detached from the instruments they trade. The ego is removed and there is no emotional investment about being right. But markets move on emotion of crowds since that is what the market is. The market can also be seen as a system in which intentionality is the main driver. Yes the fundamentals (price, yield, forecasts) play an important part in determining a basic price but it is the intention of the market, whether to buy or sell, that really drives the price.

So stock markets happily trade a twice their preceived fair value earnings. Currencies happily trade at a huge premium or discount to perceived fair value. Why does this happen? It’s simply the collective outcome of countless intentions.

And many fortunes have been lost betting against the wisdom of the crowd.

Soros suggests regulators have a part to play here in smoothing or preventing bubbles. He says that the control of the money supply itself is not enough but that credit conditions need to be managed. In essence this is the same thing depending on how you view the money supply.

He thinks margin and capital requirements for banks should be used to make credit less or more available.

He’s right to a point. But he missed the real problem which is the creation of the money supply by the banks.

Banks control both the money supply and the supply of credit . How? Well nearly all money is credit.

Now there’s something for Geroge to get his teeth into.

Buying a house used to be so simple. 2-3 times your income or 3-4 if you had joint ones. This was before the days of the grand pyramid scheme known as financial deregulation. The formula was fixed at a level that had been shown to be affordable.

So what happened to the simple model?

This quote may explain it.

It’s from a piece on the sub-prime web by Michael Lewis of Liars Poker fame,

“He called Standard & Poors and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. They were just assuming home prices would keep going up“, Eisman says

Nice one. This idea, that things keep going up, seems to have become instilled into our eco-social fabric. Buy houses, buy stocks….they always go up…..well at least in the long run.

The dreaded long run that usually ends in death, mercifully for some.

With a belief system like that it’s no wonder that the recent crash will go down in the annals of history alongside the South Sea bubble, Tulip Mania and the Great Depression.

But really it’s quite simple: learn to trust numbers. They never lie.