You'd think the money man behind an array of left wing organizations wouldn't need CNN to get out his message about the death and "bankruptcy" of free-market capitalism, but there was left-wing billionaire and financier George Soros on "GPS" Feb.18
Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria, Soros said he disagreed with President Obama's decision to bail out the banks. Soros would have nationalized them. Soros also advocated for capping CEO pay, and imposing additional taxes on financial transactions and for banks based on size.
Zakaria offered praise for Obama, saying "You can look at any (issue) all by itself, but I think he's done pretty well and in some ways hasn't gotten the credit for it because the crisis was averted. So now the Republicans can say ‘there was no problem, we didn't need to spend all this money."
Soros agreed, with that assessment, while jabbing at the GOP. "He's paying a very heavy price for actually saving the country from going into a very deep recession or depression because people haven't experienced it," Soros said. "And he wanted to be the great uniter, and to carry ... bring the country together. But the other side had absolutely no incentive to do it. It takes two to tango."
Both Zakaria and Soros made it clear they favor "state-controlled" economies.
"What does it tell us that when looking at these last four or five years, China basically handled its economic policy much more successfully, much more wisely than we did?" Zakaria asked Soros. "It was really Britain and the United States, the advanced capitalist countries, that turned out to be running very weak policies."
The problem, Soros believes, is with capitalism itself. "I mean it is effectively a bankruptcy of this market fundamentalist belief, which really came in with Reagan and Thatcher," Soros began. "Now Reagan is still in the panoply of saints in America, and we just have to recognize something went very wrong and we need to reformulate our view of how financial markets work."
