Hello I’m Shekhar Gupta and my guest today is a truly remarkable man, a brilliant speculator if I may say so and a very generous philanthropist. Somebody who knows to play the market better than anybody you would know. But also somebody who is also the most prominent critic of the markets – George Soros. Mr George Soros welcome to Walk The Talk and India.

•Shekhar Gupta: Welcome back to India. How do things look to you now? Three years back you said things look great for India?

George Soros: Well it did not work out that way. It was a very good one year and then it went the other way. And you had a big boom and a big bust.

•Shekhar Gupta: But yet we in India would like to believe that we haven’t done quite as badly.

George Soros: I think actually I made a mistake in my judgment because I thought there would be some decoupling between the Indian markets and the rest of the world. And that did not happen. The Indian market was more severely damaged than the western markets. But the economy infact hasn’t been that bad. So it was the market phenonmenon. So it was largely foreign investors coming in, like me and leaving and that what created the boom and the bust.

•Shekhar Gupta: Do you now think with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight foreign investors got panicky too soon in India that they transmitted the panic of the western markets to India.

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