Buffett, Soros & Volcker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aZFpuphWTLCQ&refer=culture

One Sage came from Omaha, seeking stocks he could hold “forever.” Another fled Hungary and traded his way to wealth. The third, a rumpled giant, slew the inflation dragon that ravaged the U.S. in the 1970s.

Warren Buffett, George Soros and Paul Volcker may look as different as Coca-Cola, Cristal and German lager. Yet all three had this in common: the character and judgment to shun the mob, as can be seen from two new books on the financial crisis, “The Sages” by Charles R. Morris and “Our Lot” by Alyssa Katz.

Their approaches are poles apart. Morris offers three biographical sketches to show what it takes to rise above financial frenzy. Katz plunges us into the stampede itself, documenting how decades of U.S. social engineering fed the anxiety and greed that drove Americans mad with housing lust. Taken together, they offer insights into how to steer through the crisis and toward a sounder future.

Morris is the lawyer and former banker who brought us “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.” In “The Sages,” he explains why Buffett, Soros and Volcker saw the crisis boiling up even as top forecasters were still predicting economic growth.

Buffett and Soros built their fortunes on the assumption that markets are often wrong. Volcker made a career out of cleaning up after market malfunctions, including the breakdown of the gold standard.

“They understand that financial markets relate to the idealized ‘Market’ of theory as the shadows in Plato’s cave do to reality,” Morris writes.

This is a primer: The choicest anecdotes will be familiar to anyone who’s read Soros’s “The Alchemy of Finance” or the Buffett biographies by Roger Lowenstein and Alice Schroeder.

We’re reminded of how Buffett liked to correct his Wharton business professors when they misquoted their own books. And how Soros theorized about his trading to the amusement of his son, who says the old man changes his positions “because his back starts killing him.” Volcker, whose every utterance moved markets, ate hot dogs for lunch and slept in “a tiny bachelor’s pad.”

Morris pads the text with passages from Soros’s “Alchemy” and Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Yet he has a gift for distilling the essence of a man in a few memorable lines:

“Soros is the global predator, with feline sensitivity to quivers of disharmony in the economic flux,” he says.

Now that the crisis has discredited bankers, economists and regulators alike, “the Sages stand taller than ever,” Morris writes. “There is a lesson there, and one hopes the world will learn it.”

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might be a good book to read..follow the money = follow the sage?

they are not really stooges because they actually know whats going down, but i like the photo so it stays

401

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~ by seeker401 on June 30, 2009.