Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros said last week that it is "conceivable" that Britain would have to resort to a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It's conceivable, you have a problem that the banking system is bigger than the economy... so for Britain to absorb it alone would really pile up the debt. Soros described the current recession as an "once-in-a-lifetime event", particularly in Britain.
On Black Wednesday, September 16, 1992, Soros became famous when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, profiting from the Bank of England's reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency. Finally, the Bank of England was forced to withdraw the currency from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and to devalue the pound sterling, and Soros earned an estimated US $ 1.1 billion in the process. He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England." Soros said on October 26, 1992, "Our total position by Black Wednesday had to be worth almost $10 billion. We planned to sell more than that. In fact, when Norman Lamont said just before the devaluation that he would borrow nearly $15 billion to defend sterling, we were amused because that was about how much we wanted to sell."
In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad accused Soros of using his wealth to punish ASEAN for welcoming Myanmar as a member. Mahatir Mohamed of Malaysia said, Soros was the hedge fund chief of Quantum and was partially responsible for the economic crash in 1997 of East Asian markets when the Thai currency relinquished its peg to the US dollar. Mohamed said, in the three years leading to the crash, through Quantum, Soros invested in short-term speculative investment in East Asian stock markets and real estate instead of production sectors. Soros divested with “indecent haste” at the first signs of currency devaluation. Not bad, Mr. Soros, create a crisis so you can make a huge profit! In the meantime how many people and institutions did you ruin?
Speaking about the financial crisis of 2009 Soros said, "This is a crisis unlike any other. It's a total collapse of the financial system with tremendous implications for everyday life. "On previous occasions when you had a crisis that was threatening the system the authorities intervened and did whatever was necessary to protect the system. This time they failed." He said he feared the problem in Britain, with its huge financial and banking interests, could be greater than in the United States.
"American memory is seared by the Depression, the German memory is seared by hyperinflation but Britain has a pretty serious problem in many ways worse than America because the financial sector looms bigger and the overvaluation of real estate is bigger than in America."
Soros uses fear mongering to his monetary benefit. He said the G20 summit in London next week was the world's last chance to avert economic disaster, but he was not optimistic of a breakthrough in efforts to spur the global economy into recovery. In my opinion, what he is really saying is let’s destroy the U.S. by getting rid of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Soros is one of the world financiers who wants to replace the U.S. dollar with the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Drawing Rights (SDR). George has some “shady” followers in this regard (See previous blogs)
Soros said further, “Unless we reconstruct and maintain the international financial system multilaterally and not bilaterally the financial system will fall apart and we will have a full blown depression.” I would suppose we include Mr. Soros and how he can make a buck from it.
Increasing IMF funding to allow it to intervene to help troubled economies is one of the main issues on the G20 agenda.
Who is George Soros? George Soros aka György Schwartz was born in1930 in Budapest, Hungary. He is a currency speculator, stock investor, philanthropist, and political activist.
Soros was thirteen years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany took military control over Hungary. Soros claimed he worked for the Jewish Council for two days. The Jewish Council had been established during the Nazi occupation of Hungary to forcibly carry out Nazi and Hungarian government anti-Jewish measures. Soros later described this time.
The Jewish Council asked the little kids to hand out the deportation notices. I was told to go to the Jewish Council. And there I was given these small slips of paper...It said report to the rabbi seminary at 9 a.m....And I was given this list of names. I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it. This was a list of Hungarian Jewish lawyers. He said, "You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported".
Soros's father bribed a Ministry of Agriculture employee so that young George could spend the summer of 1944 living with him, posing as his godson.
Soros first traded currencies during the Hungarian hyperinflation of 1945–1946.
From 1963 to 1973 he worked at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, where he attained the position of vice-president. Soros finally concluded that he was a better investor than he was an executive. In 1967 he persuaded the company to set up an offshore investment fund, First Eagle, for him to run; in 1969 the company founded a second fund for Soros, the Double Eagle hedge fund. When investment regulations restricted his ability to run the funds as he wished, he quit his position in 1973 and established a private investment company that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund.
In late 2006, Soros bought about 2 million shares of Halliburton and in 2007, the Quantum Fund returned almost 32%, netting Soros $2.9 billion.
Soros is estimated currently to be worth around $11.0 billion in net worth; he is ranked by Forbes as the 29th-richest person in the U. S. and has given away $6 billion to charities and his favorite causes since 1979.
Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute and is also a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also one of three initial funders of Center for American Progress, and is represented on the board. His funding and organization of Georgia's Rose Revolution was considered by Russian and Western observers to have been crucial to its success, although Soros said his role has been greatly exaggerated. (Georgia is a crucial area for gas and oil pipelines) In the United States, he is known for having donated large sums of money in a failed effort to defeat President George W. Bush's bid for re-election in 2004.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker wrote in 2003 in the foreword of Soros' book The Alchemy of Finance: "George Soros has made his mark as an enormously successful speculator, wise enough to largely withdraw when still way ahead of the game." (easy to do when you are manipulating the game.)
The bulk of his enormous winnings is now devoted to encouraging transitional and emerging nations to become 'open societies,' open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce but—more important—tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.
Soros' 2008 book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, describes a "superbubble" that has built up over the past 25 years and is now ready to collapse. This is the third in a series of books he's written that have predicted disaster. Soros has admitted he cried wolfe and has been wrong in the past. Now George says, “We witnessed the collapse of the financial system...It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom.”
In 1988, he was asked to join a takeover attempt of the French bank Société Générale. He declined to participate in the bid but did later buy a number of shares in the company. French authorities began an investigation in 1989, and in 2002 a French court ruled that it was insider trading, a felony conviction as defined under French securities laws and fined him $2.3 million, which was the amount that he made using the insider information.
Punitive damages were not sought because of the delay in bringing the case to trial. Soros denied any wrongdoing and said news of the takeover was public knowledge. His insider trading conviction was upheld by the highest court in France in 2006. In December, 2006 he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that the 14-year delay in bringing the case to trial precluded a fair hearing.
In 1997, Soros closed his foundation in Belarus after it was fined $3 million by the government for tax and currency violations.
Soros’ Open Society Institute gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Defense Committee of Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who has defended alleged terrorists in court and was sentenced to 2⅓ years in prison for "providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy" via a press conference for a client.
The Project on Death in America, active from 2001-2003, was one of the Open Society Institutes's projects, which sought to "understand and transform the culture and experience of dying and bereavement." In 1994, Soros delivered a speech in which he reported that he offered to help his mother, a member of the Hemlock Society, commit suicide. In the same speech, he also endorsed the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, the campaign for which he helped fund.
On November 11, 2003, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the "central focus of my life" and "a matter of life and death." He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat President Bush, "if someone guaranteed it."
Soros gave $3 million to the Center for American Progress, committed $5 million to MoveOn, while he and his friend Peter Lewis each gave America Coming Together $10 million. (All were groups that worked to support Democrats in the 2004 election.) On September 28, 2004 he dedicated more money to the campaign and kicked off his own multi-state tour with a speech: Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush delivered at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
In the U.S. presidential election of 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 Groups dedicated to defeating President Bush. Despite Soros' efforts, Bush was reelected to a second term as president in U.S. presidential election, 2004.
After Bush's reelection in 2004, Soros and other wealthy liberal political donors backed a new political fundraising group called Democracy Alliance that supports the goals of the U.S. Democratic Party.
Soros has been criticized for his large political donations, as he also pushed for the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 which was intended to ban "soft money" contributions to federal election campaigns. While banning donations to the Democratic National Committee, no such restrictions exist on soft money donations to 527 organizations. (A 527 group is a type of American tax-exempt organization named after a section of the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527. A 527 group is created primarily to influence the nomination, election,appointment or defeat of candidates for public office.) Critics say this measure allowed Soros, in effect, to gain control over the Democratic party.
In April 2008, Soros hosted an event in his apartment that had guests such as David Brock of the self-described progressive watchdog group Media Matters and liberal commentator Paul Begala. Brock said the group intended to raise $40 million to run political attack advertisements against the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, through a group called The Fund for America and Progressive Media, whose key backer, according to politico.com, is Soros.
Bill O'Reilly has on numerous occasions accused Soros of secretly backing what O'Reilly feels are "far-left" political causes.
Economically George Soros believes in a mixed economy, one with a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest.
At a Jewish forum in New York City, Soros partially attributed a recent resurgence of antisemitism to the policies of Israel and the United States, and to successful Jews such as himself:
There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It's not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well. I'm critical of those policies... If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. I can't see how one could confront it directly... I'm also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world... As an unintended consequence of my actions... I also contribute to that image.
Soros does not consider himself religious, and does not believe in God.
Personally I trust Bernie Madoff more than George Soros!
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