BARCELONA — The financial crisis, credit crunch and ensuing economic downturn have severely damaged the credibility of financial markets, institutions and traders. More and more people are claiming that markets are characterized by irrationality, bubbles, fads and frenzies, and that economic actors are driven by behavioral biases.
George Soros' recent book on the credit crisis is a good example of this line of thinking. He even suggests that established financial theory is obsolete. His view, in essence, means that the current financial crisis is the final proof that markets do not process information efficiently. If this is true, we are closer to John Maynard Keynes' view of the market as a casino than to Friedrich von Hayek's view of it as a marvelous mechanism for processing dispersed information.
For example, the recent spike in oil prices would have been driven by an irrational frenzy in futures markets. Market operators would have miscalculated systematically, been overconfident about their information and overreacted to news. I believe, however, that there is another explanation for these phenomena, which is based on rational calculation and information processing by institutions and traders.
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