The Conscience Of A Speculator

December 20, 1998: an exchange between George Soros and Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes”:

“Kroft: “You’re a Hungarian Jew …”
Soros: “Mm-hmm.”……

Kroft: “My understanding is that you went … went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.”

Soros: “Yes, that’s right. Yes.”

Kroft: “I mean, that’s—that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?”

Soros: “Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t … you don’t see the connection. But it was—it created no—no problem at all.”

Kroft: “No feeling of guilt?”

Soros: “No.”

Kroft: “For example, that, ‘I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.’ None of that?”

Soros: “Well, of course, … I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was—well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in the markets—that is I weren’t there—of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would—would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the—I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”

Are Speculators to Blame for Soaring Oil Prices?

Mike Martin has a piece on speculation at Huffington Post today arguing that the movement of oil prices is just the result of supply and demand and that speculators are taking the rap unfairly.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

This was my comment:

Good piece.. We all speculate, to different degrees, and over different time frames. Some of us do it consciously, others do it more unconsciously.

I think it’s fair to say that speculation in certain things – food and land, for starters – has social consequences we shouldn’t brush aside. But as long as money is not being priced correctly (the interest rate is held artificially low), people have an incentive to get a better return.

The underlying problem is created by the government….

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