A very strange interview of George Soros this evening, by CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo (the original, trade-marked “money honey”).

Soros, of course, is the much-billioned currency speculator who’s tanked a few economies in his time with his fancy moves in the markets.

On the plus side: Soros took a bash at the hoary – and completely false – notion of the “efficient market” – the idea (mostly propagated by economic theorists) that the market always tends to equilibrium and fully expresses all economic information in its prices. Instead, he called attention to the tendency, indeed the inevitability, of market action to go to extremes because of crowd psychology. “Reflexivity” is his term for this interactivity of human beings with their environment.

Well, gee, George. That is the insight and copyrighted mantra behind this particular website (mind-body, see?). You could have sent us a hat tip…..

Robert Prechter of Elliot Wave fame, has talked about the same thing. We ourselves prefer the New Age-ey term, intentionality, to reflexivity…..but we’re with Soros’ sentiment. Hear, hear.

On the minus side:

Soros thinks that that means the markets ought to be regulated to limit extremes of crowd emotion.

Hmmmm……we’ll pause here. There are already a posy of mechanisms in place to curb the excesses of sentiment in trading. If something like the infamous “Black Monday” of 1987 happened, trading would be automatically discontinued….

So, what on earth could Soros have in mind?

Seems he likes the Fed’s intervention in the Bear Stearns business. Absolutely the right thing to do, says he, because Bear is “too big to fail,” i.e. , if it did, investors would have lost confidence in the markets.

Well, here’s a thought, George. Maybe investors should lose confidence in these markets.

What’s going on? Looks to me like Soros wants a piece of the same action that J. P. Morgan just got for itself recently.

Next up on the weird-o-meter: Soros is all for the proposed merger of the regulatory mechanism of the stock exchange and that of the commodity exchange. Now, that’s a self-interested proposal, if ever there was one. And, what a surprise, the idea comes from the self-interested ex -CEO of Goldman who’s now at Treasury – Hank Paulson. Paulson was the guy who orchestrated the kick in the pants that got Dick Grasso out of the NYSE and got another Goldmanite in at its head (Eliot Spitzer was the most visible face of this anti-Grasso coup: Karma, anyone?). Part of Hanks’ new Panky would be to reduce the power of the SEC (Spitzer’s old roost, from where he terrorized Wall Street traders – look, the guy wasn’t all bad – and took pot shots at CEO’s – most prominently, “Hank” Greenberg, a Goldman buddy we hear).

And who would take over the SEC’s role? The new regulatory NYSE-CFTC combo and the investment houses themselves…. In other words, Hank (Paulson) says Wall Street will self-regulate.

Now, where did we hear the self-regulation mantra before? Was it in the late 90’s? That’s right. Just before the market began blowing bubbles….

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Back on the positive(with qualifications) side:

Soros is probably talking no more than sense when he advocates the regulation of the multi-trillion dollar derivative market (10 times global GDP).

But the devil is always in the details. There’s so much already in Washington’s greasy little paws that anyone proposing to hand over even more control had better give us the whole diabolical nitty-gritty…