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1、乔治索罗斯关于金融市场和泡沫演讲全文2009年10月，乔治索罗斯在位于匈牙利布达佩斯的中欧大学发表了共分五个部分的系列演讲。本文是他关于金融市场和泡沫的演讲的全文。Financial MarketsPublished: October 27 2009 22:26 | Last updated: October 27 2009 22:26 Financial markets provide an excellent laboratory for demonstrating and testing the ideas that I put forward in an abstract form y
2、esterday. The course of events is easier to observe than in most other places. Many of the facts take a quantitative form, and the data are well recorded and well preserved. The opportunity for testing occurs because my interpretation of financial markets directly contradicts the efficient market hy
3、pothesis, which has been the prevailing theory about financial markets. That theory claims that markets tend towards equilibrium; deviations occur in a random fashion and can be attributed to extraneous shocks. If that theory is valid, mine is falseand vice versa. I am not in a good position to crit
4、icize the prevailing paradigm directly. I went into the financial markets in order to make money, and to do that I did not need to know either modern portfolio theory or the theory of rational expectations. I developed my own interpretation of financial markets and put it forward as a clear alternat
5、ive to the prevailing view. When I published The Alchemy of Finance in 1987 I frankly admitted my ignorance of the generally accepted theories. No wonder that the economics profession reciprocated by ignoring my interpretation. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, did me the honor of ex
6、plicitly dismissing my theory, but most other economists simply ignored it. All this has changed in the wake of the recent financial crisis. Events have conclusively demonstrated the inadequacy of the efficient market hypothesis. It neither predicted nor explained what happened. At the same time, my
7、 writings provided a conceptual framework in terms of which events could be better understood. They began to be taken seriously, both by otherslike Mervyn Kingand by myself. I began to think that my interpretation does provide a new and better paradigm, and I put it forward as such in a book I publi
8、shed early in 2008, well before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. And yet the theory of reflexivity is still not accepted in academic circles. The failure of the efficient market hypothesis is generally admitted, but insofar as a new paradigm is emerging, it is based on behavioral economics. Behavi
9、oral economics is compatible with reflexivity but, as I will try to show, it explores only one half of the phenomenon.* * * Let me state the two cardinal principles of my conceptual framework as it applies to the financial markets. First, market prices always distort the underlying fundamentals. The
10、 degree of distortion may range from the negligible to the significant. This is in direct contradiction to the efficient market hypothesis, which maintains that market prices accurately reflect all the available information. Second, instead of playing a purely passive role in reflecting an underlyin
11、g reality, financial markets also have an active role: they can affect the so-called fundamentals they are supposed to reflect. That is the point that behavioral economics is missing. It focuses only on one half of a reflexive process: the mispricing of financial assets; it does not concern itself w
12、ith the impact of the mispricing on the so-called fundamentals. There are various feedback mechanisms at work which may validate the mispricing of financial assets, at least for a while. This may give the impression that markets are often right, but the mechanism at work is very different from the o
13、ne proposed by the prevailing paradigm. I claim that financial markets have ways of altering the fundamentals and that may bring about a closer correspondence between market prices and the underlying fundamentals. Contrast that with the efficient market hypothesis, which claims that markets always a
14、ccurately reflect reality and automatically tend towards equilibrium. There are various pathways by which the mispricing of financial assets can affect the so-called fundamentals. The most widely travelled are those which involve the use of leverageboth debt and equity leveraging. These pathways des
15、erve a lot more research. My two propositions focus attention on the reflexive feedback loops that characterize financial markets. There are two kinds of feedback: negative and positive. Negative feedback is self-correcting; positive feedback is self-reinforcing. Thus, negative feedback sets up a te
16、ndency toward equilibrium, while positive feedback produces dynamic disequilibrium. Positive feedback loops are more interesting because they can cause big moves, both in market prices and in the underlying fundamentals. A positive feedback process that runs its full course is initially self reinforcing, but eventually it is liable to reach a climax or reversal point, after which it becomes self reinforcing in the opposite direction
