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The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)

151 points by hutrdvnj 5y ago

haspoken 5y ago
https://archive.is/cI2L2 https://archive.is/cI2L2
sam537 5y ago
It's great to talk in terms of indices and devaluations and of "breaking the bank of England". The lives affected are not even spared an afterthought.
- unmole 5y ago
  The Bank of England which was responsible for artificially pumping up the value of sterling is a more appropriate target for blame.
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    You might even say forcing the prices of things to be accurate and exposing departures from reality is the purpose of financial markets and the thing an investor gets paid for. (How well that works is questionable; my completely amateur impression is that this view would force us to legalize insider trading while declaring HFT completely useless, for example.)
    - simonh 5y ago
      It forces prices to be what people believe to be accurate, where that belief is strong enough for them to put down money on it. I think that may be the closest we're ever going to get. The bit about belief above is why insider trading is illegal. If people can't trust the information they have, and at least importantly that they have fair access to accurate information, then they won't have faith in markets and won't put down their money. Belief implies trust.
      - pis0m0jad0 5y ago
        I have bad news for you, insider trading isn't about fairness. People trade, legally, on inside information all the time. Adverse selection abounds in markets, so you have to be careful. Insider trading laws are rather about theft: did you illegally appropriate information owned by someone else to benefit yourself and/or a third party? That is insider trading. In the US, it can be even more relaxed than that, with the standard being you had intent.
        lupire 5y ago
        > People trade, legally, on inside information all the time. Example?
        simonh 5y ago
        It may be a contrived definition of ‘insider information’ in an attempt to concoct a controversy. Like a company buying it’s own shares based on its internal knowledge of its condition, or employees buying share options in a scheme for their company. If it was actually an issue I expect it would have been stated instead of coyly implied. Its true not all market participants have access to the same information all the time. The point I made is that this can’t be so skewed or biased that it’s an obstacle to investment.
    - IMTDb 5y ago
      > declaring HFT completely useless, for example. Please do ! The amount of resources invested in making HFT possible and profitable is no where close to being justified by the benefits it brings to society as a whole. Making financial information move in days instead of week ? Sure !. In hours instead of days ? Yep !. In minutes instead of hours ? Why Not !. In seconds instead of minutes ? Mmmh yeah, I guess. In milliseconds instead of seconds ? Stop it. Opening a road to put high quality cables and hiring some of the most clever folks on the planet to cut half a milisec on a buy/sell algo ? Fuck you.
      - bradknowles 5y ago
        Naw, cable is slow. Even if it's optical. Still slower than direct microwave connection via line-of-sight point-to-point systems. Anyone doing fiber is doing the wrong technology, if they want to minimize total end-to-end latency.
      - bidirectional 5y ago
        Are they? Spreads have tightened massively since the advent of HFT which has knock-on effects for the small investor both in terms of cheaper personal trading and lower costs for those managing their retirement/mutual funds (see Vanguard's opinion on HFT[1]). In terms of resources, Virtu is publicly traded and has a market cap of 6.3bn, Citadel was recently valued at 22bn, the total sector is maybe 100bn. Meanwhile our society ascribes about 260bn of value to Coca Cola alone. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feab...
        sdfgdf 5y ago
        gregw2 5y ago
        Spreads may have tightened, but payments for order flow suggest to me there's a new flavor of front running involved via HFT and dark pools. But I'm no expert.
    - daniel-cussen 5y ago
      This is true. Speculators play a vital role in stabilizing the price of a commodity over time. All other forms of arbitrage are meaningless besides the biggest one of them all: temporal arbitrage. Buy low sell high. And with it, sell high buy low. Government employees, for instance for Codelco, Chile's state-owned mining corporation, value speculators because those speculations are the best predictions of the future. Suddenly you can make guarantees to your stakeholders, and sell futures, and plan, feed the prediction into your other math. Also I'm not sure HFT is totally useless. If you set a minimum latency in the market and forbade anybody go around that you would get cheaters, and less integrity, and roll back trades. Instead, with HFT, the only challenge of the fastest is to really be the fastest. They gotta win. Further, at a societal level, I divine there are harmful macro artifacts that happen at large multiples of HFT's granularity. So when the latency was milliseconds, artifacts happened in years, in microseconds, they happened in days.
      - hakfoo 5y ago
        It feels like a theory/practice problem. If there were zero external costs to having a minimum-latency market, no big deal. But we're still short of that. So there's a lot of money and brainpower being thrown into marginal decreases in market latency. Do we want so many of our best engineers chasing HFT performance? It also creates a new ecosystem of arbitrage-- the guy with 20ms ping can take advantage of price differences the guy with 40ms can't-- which isn't necessarily producing real value. This also assumes that the goal of absolute price discovery is itself meritorious. Maybe we're better off not being able to correctly value assets with infinite precision, because it tends to encourage the mindset of chopping up businesses for parts. I'm a fan of the old-line conglomerate model. By bundling so many diverse assets, they inherently block price discovery, which creates openings where risk hedges and long term plays can survive and pay out. But investors hate being unable to pull those components out of the stock price.
        daniel-cussen 5y ago
        I don't know that they actually are that competitive about marginal decreases in market latency. I think they're competitive for some stuff, but for others, it's easier to split the atom than split their eyelids. Literally. Like I came up with a sorting algorithm I thought HFT--just some single monopolistic HFT company--would love, like die for. And I kept it so secret, did so much so nobody could hack it under any circumstances, never put it in an email, nothing, and? and? I sent it to over 40 FAANG and HFT equivalents and never heard back. They really don't care about time, like really in real life. After the fact, yeah. Like when you're explaining to them why they lost money I guess. Not beforehand, when they could make money. You're projecting about how competitive it actually is. Maybe if I actually split the eyelids first, then it would be competitive, but without that it is it is about as competitive as auctions for the best uranium mineral rights in the 1920's. Nobody gives a shit!
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Is that what actually happened in this case, though? (Not a rhetorical question, I honestly don't know). I ask because the decision to short the pound was a coordinated attack among many powerful financial institutions. There is a reason collusion in other economic areas is illegal, precisely because it allows a "mispricing" to occur compared to what would happen if their were arms-length, fair competition. Again, I have no idea if this is a valid criticism of Soros' trade, but the part of the article about him convincing other investors to go along with trade reminded me in a way of the agreement of SV companies not to poach each other's talent, which HN loves to decry as illegal collusion to depress wages.
    - H8crilA 5y ago
      They (UK govt at large) tried to keep the value of the Pound up, so that the UK could join the Eurozone, which was being constructed at that time. Large inflation started building up in the UK and there was not enough buy-in to do what's right (jack up the rates, cause a recession, clean the economy; like Volcker did in the US), so they eventually had to admit to their failure and let the Pound trade down. The "insight" that Soros and others like him had was when would this happen. It's been known to be unstable for years, it was known to break eventually (unless rates go up, by a lot), the only question was when. Also, this outcome was what "the people wanted". As I wrote above, there was not enough buy-in to jack up the rates and save the currency at the expense of jobs, so the opposite happened, jobs were saved at the expense of the currency. Low currency isn't necessarily bad - it's good for some people and bad for other people. In fact these days countries routinely accuse other countries of suppressing the value of their currency, to facilitate a desirable trade balance (China vs US, as an example; remember Trump's tariffs?).
      - TMWNN 5y ago
        >They (UK govt at large) tried to keep the value of the Pound up, so that the UK could join the Eurozone, which was being constructed at that time. Didn't this prove beneficial to the UK in the long run? The Guardian speculated in 2013 (<http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/02/britain-euro-what-if-joined http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/...>) that if Britain had joined the Euro: * The mid-2000s British housing bubble, and its collapse in 2007, would have been even bigger. * Britain would have had to ask the IMF, ECB, and EU for loans. * The Tories would in 2010 have promised a referendum to leave the Euro and won a majority. Labour would have won fewer than 100 seats, and UKIP would have "made spectacular gains". * The anti-Euro side would have won the referendum, and the currency would have collapsed. * "after a deep and painful recession economic recovery began". * "Britain would have destroyed the euro on departure, and would now be on the point of leaving the EU altogether. The idea that Farage might be the next prime minister would be quite credible." And the UK not being part of the ERM or Eurozone in no way disadvantaged London from becoming the continent's financial capital during the 1990s and later.
  - parasense 5y ago
    Agreed. It's basic game theory, understanding adversarial finance, and applying risk management practices at the sovereign state (central bank) level. It does seem strange today to bet somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 ~ $8 billions, to only realize a capital gain of ~$1 billion, but it's actually a really impressive ~14% return. The issue I suppose is where taking that adversarial position, and then being outspoken about the topic, in essence a variation of pump'n'dump for short sellers... proclaim the doom of the British sterling, and the doom becomes real via market awareness.... or, is "market awareness" really just market manipulation?
  - taylorius 5y ago
    The Bank of England did what it was told - the Conservative Government's were intent on maintaining Sterling within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism currency band (a precursor step to harmonizing currencies into what would become the Euro). This was what allowed Soros to endlessly short the pound.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > The lives affected are not even spared an afterthought Look at it from a software perspective: there was a huge vulnerability possible. If it hadn't been exploited by this person, someone else would have. It was the Bank of England fault for not patching the exploit and creating the vulnerability.
  - boxed 5y ago
    It was your fault for not putting on a helmet and allowing me to hit you with a steel pipe and take your money. See the problem? There's a reason it's illegal to exploit vulnerabilities in software. It's even illegal to exploit them in humans (mostly). It's called fraud.
    - DeWilde 5y ago
      In a world where there are people that will hit you with a steel pipe and will not be stopped by the legality of the matter then it is your fault for not putting on the helmet. But that isn't a good comparison for this case as what he did was not illegal. Unlike hitting people with steel pipes.
      - drekk 5y ago
        I appreciate the honesty and consistency at least of doubling down on blaming the victim. Our pipe-wielding example will just find another victim without a helmet. You can always find something a victim could have done differently, the only common thread is the perpetrator. Also legality isn't a proxy for morality. Slavery was illegal. Some societies allowed cannibalism. What Soros did had a human cost and the fact someone else might have done the same financial alchemy had he not doesn't excuse it.
        colinmhayes 5y ago
        The UK central bank was actively harming their economy with this nonsensical peg. Comparing trading an obviously overvalued currency to hitting someone with a pipe is similarly nonsensical. The government was not the victim here, but the perpetrator of the crime. Soros forced them to stop before the central bank could cause even more damage.
- cloutchaser 5y ago
  As much as I disagree with Soros on a lot of things, betting on a government being unable to manipulate it's currency forever, and succeeding on that bet is the government's fault, not Soros'.
  - ortusdux 5y ago
    A bet is a tax on bullshit.
    - djbusby 5y ago
      So...Soros taxed the Gov on their BS? Is that correct?
  - jollybean 5y ago
    It's 100% Soros's fault and he probably should have been jailed for it. A nation was pursuing an economic policy towards harmonising their economy with that of another - a very nuanced process. Like two ships lining up so that one could supply the other. That it makes an economy possibly more vulnerable to external issues (like a giant wave) is true, but it's a necessary condition that ostensibly has future benefits of economic alignment (i.e. ships being resupplied worth some risk). Soros is a thief, a pirate, like any other - he came a long and created enormous risk, extracted billions into his fat pocket which would otherwise be in public coffers, and didn't create a dime in value for anyone, it's a zero sum game in which he ran off with riches learning everyone else poorer. It's cockroach capitalism of the worst kind.
- nabla9 5y ago
  Soros did not "break" something that was fine if left untouched. He realized that exchange rate was overvalued and acted on it. Resulted devaluation of GBP made British labour more competitive overnight and fixed the imbalance. Other European countries (like Finland) had similar problems at the same and were forced eventually to devalue without any coordinated attack. When economies do not form an optimal currency area, tying currencies together with fixed rate creates all kinds of problems. Having floating exchange rate where central bank only "leans" to reduce volatility is usually the best course of action. Eurozone is constantly battling against internal imbalances. Moving towards common fiscal policy is one way to fix them.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Is the US an optimal currency area?
- throwawaycities 5y ago
  > The lives affected are not even spared an afterthought. Such a simple, beautiful and powerful sentence. For some reason I instinctually read it in Morgan Freeman’s voice.
  - sam537 5y ago
    Thank you.
- pavlov 5y ago
  It's not like a currency devaluation affects everyone equally, or even uniformly negatively. If you were a British factory worker, it might have saved your job because British exports became more competitive. If you were a middle class office worker, it probably made life more inconvenient because imported goods became more expensive, and that Spanish vacation you had been planning might now be out of reach. If you were a member of the upper class, your wealth was probably already well hedged against GBP risk by using offshore currency accounts, foreign stock investments, etc.
- mannerheim 5y ago
  I've heard the same kind of blame leveled at the characters of the Big Short. But just as they didn't make banks give out bad loans, Soros didn't make the Bank of England put an unsustainable currency peg in place.
  - shortbig 5y ago
Jyaif 5y ago
> For many, it was obvious that the pound sterling was overvalued > The Bank of England was finally forced to give up the fight a few hours after the attack, announcing its exit from the European monetary system with a devaluation of about 15% Sounds like George Soros just fixed a disequilibrium? How is he the bad guy in this story?
- astoor 5y ago
  He's the bad guy of the story because he's a billionaire who made a $1.1Gb at the expense of the ordinary people living in the UK at the time. He forced mortgage rates, for example, to shoot up to 15%, with crippling monthly payments for a large chunk of the population. Note that the article author is a cryptocurrency cultist, so he'll be all in favour of unscrupulous people enriching themselves at the expense of others irrespective of the negative effects this might have on society or the environment or whatever.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Wouldn't Soros argue that all he did was accelerate their leaving of an already increasingly strained ERM? The ministers in charge didn't want to be in the ERM, it was all Major.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > He forced mortgage rates, for example, to shoot up to 15%, with crippling monthly payments for a large chunk of the population. Does British monetary policy not get some blame, here? It was a sudden shock because they were putting their foot on the scale for quite some time.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      The ERM was Major's big idea, most of his ministers didn't like it. The fact that they still went along with it is unimaginable in British politics today. Although the market's should not be worshipped, this is probably a good example of why you shouldn't be too ardent in your nudging of them for political reasons.
kasperni 5y ago
In 1997, the UK Treasury estimated the cost of Black Wednesday at £3.14 billion, which was revised to £3.3 billion in 2005 [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday#:~:text=In%201997%2C%20the%20UK%20Treasury,%C2%A313%E2%80%9327%20billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday#:~:text=In%201...).
parenthesis 5y ago
No mention of Stanley Druckenmiller. See lines 482 - 544 in a speech given by Druckenmiller https://gist.github.com/bluechoochoo/a034da52c64ac6fcb637 https://gist.github.com/bluechoochoo/a034da52c64ac6fcb637 where he talks about his and Soros' respective roles in the infamous trade.
blibble 5y ago
if this hadn't happened then the UK would have joined the euro brexit under the euro would have been all but impossible I wonder if Soros regrets "breaking the bank", especially given he was a huge remain supporter (donating vast amounts to the campaign)
- DrBazza 5y ago
  > if this hadn't happened then the UK would have joined the euro Interesting. Any links?
  - blibble 5y ago
    that's what ERM1 was, fixing your exchange rate against the "European Currency Unit" and 1 ECU became 1 euro on 1 January 1999 now that the euro exists: joining ERM (version 2) is phase 1 of joining the euro
- makomk 5y ago
  Yeah, if not for this there's a good chance the UK would be part of the Euro and much more closely tied to the EU. I doubt this would've worked out well overall for the country though; there were other European countries which had similar issues maintaining their exchange rate and the underlying economic mismatches continued to cause economic crises once they joined the Euro.
- bitshiftfaced 5y ago
  Short sellers don't strike me as the type who regret doing something that made them a billion dollars.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >if this hadn't happened then the UK would have joined the euro >brexit under the euro would have been all but impossible Not necessarily. The Guardian speculated in 2013 (<http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/02/britain-euro-what-if-joined http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/...>) that if Britain had joined the Euro: * The mid-2000s British housing bubble, and its collapse in 2007, would have been even bigger. * Britain would have had to ask the IMF, ECB, and EU for loans. * The Tories would in 2010 have promised a referendum to leave the Euro and won a majority. Labour would have won fewer than 100 seats, and UKIP would have "made spectacular gains". * The anti-Euro side would have won the referendum, and the currency would have collapsed. * "after a deep and painful recession economic recovery began". * "Britain would have destroyed the euro on departure, and would now be on the point of leaving the EU altogether. The idea that Farage might be the next prime minister would be quite credible."
throwawayp0rn 5y ago
Wasn't technically the LPs who each made a fraction of that 1.1B while Soros and Druck got the 5 and 20 or whatever fees they charged them?
- boringg 5y ago
  True but the story doesn't read as well when you put it that way.
admax88qqq 5y ago
If I have to read "massive speculative attack" one more time... Almost every paragraph ends with this, and it takes 5 paragraphs just to start explaining what the attack was and how it worked. This wouldn't pass high school English.
- criddell 5y ago
  Your high school didn't grade essays based on engagement? /s
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    lol fair point
- rvba 5y ago
  Probably helps with SEO.
- xenocratus 5y ago
  This one might be better: https://priceonomics.com/the-trade-of-the-century-when-george-soros-broke/ https://priceonomics.com/the-trade-of-the-century-when-georg...
codeulike 5y ago
I remember listening to the news on the radio that day, the government changed the interest rate twice, from 10% to 12% at about 11am and then a couple of hours later up to 15%
motohagiography 5y ago
The myth is about Soros, but it was a network of largely U.S. investment banks that co-ordinated and piled on to raid the BoE. Consider that the GameStonks craze where people just really, really liked the stock got threatened with charges of market manipulation, almost took out Robinhood, with contagion exposure to Citadel with system wide risk, and caused back door intervention by Fed authorities and even the Whitehouse - Soros' payday is evidence for Balzac's adage that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. I have no doubt what he did would be absolutely criminal today. He went on to create the Open Society Foundations, which supported and co-ordinated aspects of the (then) progressive anti-globalization movement of the 90s I was involved in. At the time the movement was mostly anti-capitalist, uniting labor and civil society against (neo-liberal) trade agreements designed to exploit the poverty and authoritarianism of other countries and to hollow out western economies by exporting manufacturing jobs, and against exploitative policies by the IMF, who used loans to indebt and subordinate elected governments and force privatization and sale of their infrastructure to transnational corps and roll back environmental protection. (see, confessions of an economic hitman, nologo, etc.) Ostensibly noble causes. It almost seemed like a billionaire's noblesse oblige. Soros was the "good capitalist." The movements themselves failed after 9/11, and Occupy was a whimper in comparison to the battles of Seattle, Quebec City, Turin, and others. The US rust belt was exported destroyed in the 90's and 2000s, laying the ground for the populist revolt that created 2015 election result. However, his OSF foundations and network of NGOs flourished, installing progressive activists from the era in colleges and political parties, and other key institutions. Trouble is, these weren't working class labor organizers and anarcho-anti-capitalists, they were technocrats, equipped with an ideology whose specific endgame is central economic co-ordination, and it was nominally anti-capitalist in the sense that it is against the individualistic cultural aspects of smallholders and the autonomy and values small business provides, and that it uses critical theory as a tool to dissolve the bonds of societies. This is the kernel of truth beneath the layers of hallucinatory conspiracy theory. To me, Soros is just a visionary criminal who learned about totalitarianism from the inside during his youth, and has funded his own vision of that technocratic system. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's just what any billionaire criminal with a will to power seeking to build a empire would do, and imo, he has.
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
rvba 5y ago
> Even better, Soros managed to convince other investors and investment banks (JP Morgan, Bank of America, Jones Investment, …) that the pound sterling would collapse in the event of a massive and coordinated attack. I wonder how this wouod be judged with current "insider trading" laws, but since it is a foreign country (even if ally) then probably nothing would be done. Also the article doesnt seem to mention that Bank of England could stop their losses and stop trying to save the pound. I have a feeling that actions of central banks are poorly discussed - in many ways those banks seem to be a source of recession (UK, Japan) or method of transfer of wealth to the rich (quantitative easing... seriously it is just pure evil).
- not2b 5y ago
  But Soros and his allies were not using confidential information; they were not insiders. I am not a fan of this kind of thing at all, but insider trading laws aren't relevant. As for your last point, yes, if the Bank of England had surrendered earlier they would have lost far less money and Soros and his allies would have made far less profit.
  - rvba 5y ago
    Talking with a group of investors behind closed doors to agree and execute a strategy seems like a very obvious market manipulation.
    - not2b 5y ago
      Yes, but that isn't insider trading. Maybe it violates some other rule; IANAL.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > I have a feeling that actions of central banks are poorly discussed You and I have very different definition of “poorly discussed”.
  - rvba 5y ago
mc32 5y ago
If only every target had the wherewithal of the Porsche/Piech family which instead broke its shorters the world would be slightly a fairer place.
jddil 5y ago
The Day the Bank of England was caught in an artificial pumping scheme is way more accurate of a title. But I guess anything to smear Soros and the "left" gets upvoted to HN nowadays. Connection being the authoritative right sees Soros as the analog to the Koch bros.... not quite understanding we don't like capitalists anymore than the right likes socialists. But hey Soros === bad, leftist === bad so to the top of HN it goes. (please prove me wrong)
- fallingfrog 5y ago
  I agree, I don't think I'd call Soros a leftist- a liberal, maybe. But leftist is wrong- he's a wealthy capitalist, and leftist thought generally involves anticapitalist views. In fact leftists generally view center liberals as their most effective enemies. But yeah the right always tries to portray him as leftist to try to connect him with "antifa" as part of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
- regularfry 5y ago
  George Soros has been known as "The Man Who Broke The Bank of England" pretty much since it happened. It's a riff on a much earlier phrase, "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo", which has been around since the 19th century, referring to a gambler. It pre-dates the current right's antisemitic obsession with him by quite a long way, and I don't think it's been used as a pejorative term at all - more a mark of respect. But I could be wrong about that.
  - lupire 5y ago
    The confusion in this thread is that some people think "breaking the bank" is an insult to the breaker, because the bank is the "good guy". It's a bit bizarre.
shrubble 5y ago
"I am there to make money; I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do" - George Soros Someone who explicitly says that as a teenager, he enjoyed his time working for the Nazis while they were looting those targeted, is not going to be shamed over taking $1 billion in a trade. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGWizajL7tA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGWizajL7tA compilation of clips from 60 Minutes interviews, etc. (from 3m45s he talks about his time helping to confiscate property from Hungarian Jews)
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  Wikipedia: Tivadar [his father] saved not only his immediate family but also many other Hungarian Jews, and Soros later wrote that 1944 had been "the happiest [year] of his life," for it had given him the opportunity to witness his father's heroism.[ Stop lying.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    The idea that Soros, who was a 13-year old Hungarian Jew pretending to be christian as to not be murdered by the Nazis, somehow was sympathetic to the nazis is one of the laziest attempts at smearing someone I can remember.
    - lupire 5y ago
      The accusation is not that he sympathized with the Nazis. Quite the contrary, the accusation is that he has no sympathy for anyone. The accusation is that his worldview, was (and is) that he is responsible only for himself and he has no effect on affairs because if he didn't do [whatever] someone else would. He claims, on essence, that the events of the world is an unchangeable script, and the only control we have is which role we play. For an expert in markets, he claims stunning ignorance of the concept of marginal effects, and a non-stunning awareness of how to profit from amorality.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  I had thought poorly of George Soros based on other people's words, before reading all of the comments written thus far in this thread. Watching the video you linked, cemented my notion that Goeorge Soros is being treated as a scapegoat. Thank you for sharing the video, as I had never actually listened to him speak before. In that video, he seems like a logical and emotional person who can keep emotions in their proper perspective. Everything is nuanced, and he can navigate it. It looks like he has a high emotional IQ and intelligence IQ. Regarding the last segment of the video that contains an audio clip, it talks about personal development. Personal development can happen in terrible enviornments like the German occupation and Nazi confescation of Jewish assets. He was glad that he developed as opposed to not developing. It's a little odd that he called it a happy time though, and I am disappointed that he does not believe in God, but that doesn't mean he should be made a scapegoat for unwinding of financial problems started by others.
tim333 5y ago
An interesting and amusing take on it from Gyles Brandreth who was in the room on the UK government side of this https://youtu.be/dwRfVtdqfWY?t=85 https://youtu.be/dwRfVtdqfWY?t=85
neves 5y ago
In Brazil the alt-right calls Soros a lefist billionare that finances communism around the world. Does this craziness exist in other places of the world?
- Qub3d 5y ago
  George Soros conspiracy theories have been a dogwhistle for antisemitism used in right-leaning politics in the United States for decades.
  - rhexs 5y ago
    - Qub3d 5y ago
      I am replying in the context of the parent comment asking if opinions of Soros in Brazil match the rest of the world. Which, well... they do. You are allowed to call George Soros evil, greedy, what-have-you. However, antisemitism is a real thing, and his name has been commonly invoked as part of conspiracy theories pushing it.
      - moltke 5y ago
- lamp987 5y ago
  He does finance political NGOs around the world, yes. Communism, definitely not.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Yes. It's a popular right-wing conspiracy theory here in the US, too. I've also had to disabuse several people of the notion that he was a Nazi.
boredumb 5y ago
England, Thailand, Malaysia....
steve76 5y ago
[dead]
Terry_Roll 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
screenbreakout 5y ago
Is there any chance someone could bet on the Swiss franc being undervalued to the extent it's central bank would have to accept a 1/1 parity with the euro... are there other similar cases of ("collusion") of individual entities that have outbet government policies to this or further extent?
omoikane 5y ago
Related: "When George Soros Broke the British Pound (2014)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21454383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21454383

151 points by hutrdvnj 5y ago

https://archive.is/cI2L2 https://archive.is/cI2L2

It's great to talk in terms of indices and devaluations and of "breaking the bank of England". The lives affected are not even spared an afterthought.

unmole 5y ago
The Bank of England which was responsible for artificially pumping up the value of sterling is a more appropriate target for blame.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  You might even say forcing the prices of things to be accurate and exposing departures from reality is the purpose of financial markets and the thing an investor gets paid for. (How well that works is questionable; my completely amateur impression is that this view would force us to legalize insider trading while declaring HFT completely useless, for example.)
  - simonh 5y ago
    It forces prices to be what people believe to be accurate, where that belief is strong enough for them to put down money on it. I think that may be the closest we're ever going to get. The bit about belief above is why insider trading is illegal. If people can't trust the information they have, and at least importantly that they have fair access to accurate information, then they won't have faith in markets and won't put down their money. Belief implies trust.
    - pis0m0jad0 5y ago
      I have bad news for you, insider trading isn't about fairness. People trade, legally, on inside information all the time. Adverse selection abounds in markets, so you have to be careful. Insider trading laws are rather about theft: did you illegally appropriate information owned by someone else to benefit yourself and/or a third party? That is insider trading. In the US, it can be even more relaxed than that, with the standard being you had intent.
      - lupire 5y ago
        > People trade, legally, on inside information all the time. Example?
        simonh 5y ago
        It may be a contrived definition of ‘insider information’ in an attempt to concoct a controversy. Like a company buying it’s own shares based on its internal knowledge of its condition, or employees buying share options in a scheme for their company. If it was actually an issue I expect it would have been stated instead of coyly implied. Its true not all market participants have access to the same information all the time. The point I made is that this can’t be so skewed or biased that it’s an obstacle to investment.
  - IMTDb 5y ago
    > declaring HFT completely useless, for example. Please do ! The amount of resources invested in making HFT possible and profitable is no where close to being justified by the benefits it brings to society as a whole. Making financial information move in days instead of week ? Sure !. In hours instead of days ? Yep !. In minutes instead of hours ? Why Not !. In seconds instead of minutes ? Mmmh yeah, I guess. In milliseconds instead of seconds ? Stop it. Opening a road to put high quality cables and hiring some of the most clever folks on the planet to cut half a milisec on a buy/sell algo ? Fuck you.
    - bradknowles 5y ago
      Naw, cable is slow. Even if it's optical. Still slower than direct microwave connection via line-of-sight point-to-point systems. Anyone doing fiber is doing the wrong technology, if they want to minimize total end-to-end latency.
    - bidirectional 5y ago
      Are they? Spreads have tightened massively since the advent of HFT which has knock-on effects for the small investor both in terms of cheaper personal trading and lower costs for those managing their retirement/mutual funds (see Vanguard's opinion on HFT[1]). In terms of resources, Virtu is publicly traded and has a market cap of 6.3bn, Citadel was recently valued at 22bn, the total sector is maybe 100bn. Meanwhile our society ascribes about 260bn of value to Coca Cola alone. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feab...
      - sdfgdf 5y ago
      - gregw2 5y ago
        Spreads may have tightened, but payments for order flow suggest to me there's a new flavor of front running involved via HFT and dark pools. But I'm no expert.
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    This is true. Speculators play a vital role in stabilizing the price of a commodity over time. All other forms of arbitrage are meaningless besides the biggest one of them all: temporal arbitrage. Buy low sell high. And with it, sell high buy low. Government employees, for instance for Codelco, Chile's state-owned mining corporation, value speculators because those speculations are the best predictions of the future. Suddenly you can make guarantees to your stakeholders, and sell futures, and plan, feed the prediction into your other math. Also I'm not sure HFT is totally useless. If you set a minimum latency in the market and forbade anybody go around that you would get cheaters, and less integrity, and roll back trades. Instead, with HFT, the only challenge of the fastest is to really be the fastest. They gotta win. Further, at a societal level, I divine there are harmful macro artifacts that happen at large multiples of HFT's granularity. So when the latency was milliseconds, artifacts happened in years, in microseconds, they happened in days.
    - hakfoo 5y ago
      It feels like a theory/practice problem. If there were zero external costs to having a minimum-latency market, no big deal. But we're still short of that. So there's a lot of money and brainpower being thrown into marginal decreases in market latency. Do we want so many of our best engineers chasing HFT performance? It also creates a new ecosystem of arbitrage-- the guy with 20ms ping can take advantage of price differences the guy with 40ms can't-- which isn't necessarily producing real value. This also assumes that the goal of absolute price discovery is itself meritorious. Maybe we're better off not being able to correctly value assets with infinite precision, because it tends to encourage the mindset of chopping up businesses for parts. I'm a fan of the old-line conglomerate model. By bundling so many diverse assets, they inherently block price discovery, which creates openings where risk hedges and long term plays can survive and pay out. But investors hate being unable to pull those components out of the stock price.
      - daniel-cussen 5y ago
        I don't know that they actually are that competitive about marginal decreases in market latency. I think they're competitive for some stuff, but for others, it's easier to split the atom than split their eyelids. Literally. Like I came up with a sorting algorithm I thought HFT--just some single monopolistic HFT company--would love, like die for. And I kept it so secret, did so much so nobody could hack it under any circumstances, never put it in an email, nothing, and? and? I sent it to over 40 FAANG and HFT equivalents and never heard back. They really don't care about time, like really in real life. After the fact, yeah. Like when you're explaining to them why they lost money I guess. Not beforehand, when they could make money. You're projecting about how competitive it actually is. Maybe if I actually split the eyelids first, then it would be competitive, but without that it is it is about as competitive as auctions for the best uranium mineral rights in the 1920's. Nobody gives a shit!
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Is that what actually happened in this case, though? (Not a rhetorical question, I honestly don't know). I ask because the decision to short the pound was a coordinated attack among many powerful financial institutions. There is a reason collusion in other economic areas is illegal, precisely because it allows a "mispricing" to occur compared to what would happen if their were arms-length, fair competition. Again, I have no idea if this is a valid criticism of Soros' trade, but the part of the article about him convincing other investors to go along with trade reminded me in a way of the agreement of SV companies not to poach each other's talent, which HN loves to decry as illegal collusion to depress wages.
  - H8crilA 5y ago
    They (UK govt at large) tried to keep the value of the Pound up, so that the UK could join the Eurozone, which was being constructed at that time. Large inflation started building up in the UK and there was not enough buy-in to do what's right (jack up the rates, cause a recession, clean the economy; like Volcker did in the US), so they eventually had to admit to their failure and let the Pound trade down. The "insight" that Soros and others like him had was when would this happen. It's been known to be unstable for years, it was known to break eventually (unless rates go up, by a lot), the only question was when. Also, this outcome was what "the people wanted". As I wrote above, there was not enough buy-in to jack up the rates and save the currency at the expense of jobs, so the opposite happened, jobs were saved at the expense of the currency. Low currency isn't necessarily bad - it's good for some people and bad for other people. In fact these days countries routinely accuse other countries of suppressing the value of their currency, to facilitate a desirable trade balance (China vs US, as an example; remember Trump's tariffs?).
    - TMWNN 5y ago
      >They (UK govt at large) tried to keep the value of the Pound up, so that the UK could join the Eurozone, which was being constructed at that time. Didn't this prove beneficial to the UK in the long run? The Guardian speculated in 2013 (<http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/02/britain-euro-what-if-joined http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/...>) that if Britain had joined the Euro: * The mid-2000s British housing bubble, and its collapse in 2007, would have been even bigger. * Britain would have had to ask the IMF, ECB, and EU for loans. * The Tories would in 2010 have promised a referendum to leave the Euro and won a majority. Labour would have won fewer than 100 seats, and UKIP would have "made spectacular gains". * The anti-Euro side would have won the referendum, and the currency would have collapsed. * "after a deep and painful recession economic recovery began". * "Britain would have destroyed the euro on departure, and would now be on the point of leaving the EU altogether. The idea that Farage might be the next prime minister would be quite credible." And the UK not being part of the ERM or Eurozone in no way disadvantaged London from becoming the continent's financial capital during the 1990s and later.
- parasense 5y ago
  Agreed. It's basic game theory, understanding adversarial finance, and applying risk management practices at the sovereign state (central bank) level. It does seem strange today to bet somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 ~ $8 billions, to only realize a capital gain of ~$1 billion, but it's actually a really impressive ~14% return. The issue I suppose is where taking that adversarial position, and then being outspoken about the topic, in essence a variation of pump'n'dump for short sellers... proclaim the doom of the British sterling, and the doom becomes real via market awareness.... or, is "market awareness" really just market manipulation?
- taylorius 5y ago
  The Bank of England did what it was told - the Conservative Government's were intent on maintaining Sterling within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism currency band (a precursor step to harmonizing currencies into what would become the Euro). This was what allowed Soros to endlessly short the pound.
csdvrx 5y ago
> The lives affected are not even spared an afterthought Look at it from a software perspective: there was a huge vulnerability possible. If it hadn't been exploited by this person, someone else would have. It was the Bank of England fault for not patching the exploit and creating the vulnerability.
- boxed 5y ago
  It was your fault for not putting on a helmet and allowing me to hit you with a steel pipe and take your money. See the problem? There's a reason it's illegal to exploit vulnerabilities in software. It's even illegal to exploit them in humans (mostly). It's called fraud.
  - DeWilde 5y ago
    In a world where there are people that will hit you with a steel pipe and will not be stopped by the legality of the matter then it is your fault for not putting on the helmet. But that isn't a good comparison for this case as what he did was not illegal. Unlike hitting people with steel pipes.
    - drekk 5y ago
      I appreciate the honesty and consistency at least of doubling down on blaming the victim. Our pipe-wielding example will just find another victim without a helmet. You can always find something a victim could have done differently, the only common thread is the perpetrator. Also legality isn't a proxy for morality. Slavery was illegal. Some societies allowed cannibalism. What Soros did had a human cost and the fact someone else might have done the same financial alchemy had he not doesn't excuse it.
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        The UK central bank was actively harming their economy with this nonsensical peg. Comparing trading an obviously overvalued currency to hitting someone with a pipe is similarly nonsensical. The government was not the victim here, but the perpetrator of the crime. Soros forced them to stop before the central bank could cause even more damage.
cloutchaser 5y ago
As much as I disagree with Soros on a lot of things, betting on a government being unable to manipulate it's currency forever, and succeeding on that bet is the government's fault, not Soros'.
- ortusdux 5y ago
  A bet is a tax on bullshit.
  - djbusby 5y ago
    So...Soros taxed the Gov on their BS? Is that correct?
- jollybean 5y ago
  It's 100% Soros's fault and he probably should have been jailed for it. A nation was pursuing an economic policy towards harmonising their economy with that of another - a very nuanced process. Like two ships lining up so that one could supply the other. That it makes an economy possibly more vulnerable to external issues (like a giant wave) is true, but it's a necessary condition that ostensibly has future benefits of economic alignment (i.e. ships being resupplied worth some risk). Soros is a thief, a pirate, like any other - he came a long and created enormous risk, extracted billions into his fat pocket which would otherwise be in public coffers, and didn't create a dime in value for anyone, it's a zero sum game in which he ran off with riches learning everyone else poorer. It's cockroach capitalism of the worst kind.
nabla9 5y ago
Soros did not "break" something that was fine if left untouched. He realized that exchange rate was overvalued and acted on it. Resulted devaluation of GBP made British labour more competitive overnight and fixed the imbalance. Other European countries (like Finland) had similar problems at the same and were forced eventually to devalue without any coordinated attack. When economies do not form an optimal currency area, tying currencies together with fixed rate creates all kinds of problems. Having floating exchange rate where central bank only "leans" to reduce volatility is usually the best course of action. Eurozone is constantly battling against internal imbalances. Moving towards common fiscal policy is one way to fix them.
- lupire 5y ago
  Is the US an optimal currency area?
throwawaycities 5y ago
> The lives affected are not even spared an afterthought. Such a simple, beautiful and powerful sentence. For some reason I instinctually read it in Morgan Freeman’s voice.
- sam537 5y ago
  Thank you.
pavlov 5y ago
It's not like a currency devaluation affects everyone equally, or even uniformly negatively. If you were a British factory worker, it might have saved your job because British exports became more competitive. If you were a middle class office worker, it probably made life more inconvenient because imported goods became more expensive, and that Spanish vacation you had been planning might now be out of reach. If you were a member of the upper class, your wealth was probably already well hedged against GBP risk by using offshore currency accounts, foreign stock investments, etc.
mannerheim 5y ago
I've heard the same kind of blame leveled at the characters of the Big Short. But just as they didn't make banks give out bad loans, Soros didn't make the Bank of England put an unsustainable currency peg in place.
- shortbig 5y ago

Jyaif 5y ago

> For many, it was obvious that the pound sterling was overvalued > The Bank of England was finally forced to give up the fight a few hours after the attack, announcing its exit from the European monetary system with a devaluation of about 15% Sounds like George Soros just fixed a disequilibrium? How is he the bad guy in this story?

astoor 5y ago
He's the bad guy of the story because he's a billionaire who made a $1.1Gb at the expense of the ordinary people living in the UK at the time. He forced mortgage rates, for example, to shoot up to 15%, with crippling monthly payments for a large chunk of the population. Note that the article author is a cryptocurrency cultist, so he'll be all in favour of unscrupulous people enriching themselves at the expense of others irrespective of the negative effects this might have on society or the environment or whatever.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Wouldn't Soros argue that all he did was accelerate their leaving of an already increasingly strained ERM? The ministers in charge didn't want to be in the ERM, it was all Major.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > He forced mortgage rates, for example, to shoot up to 15%, with crippling monthly payments for a large chunk of the population. Does British monetary policy not get some blame, here? It was a sudden shock because they were putting their foot on the scale for quite some time.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    The ERM was Major's big idea, most of his ministers didn't like it. The fact that they still went along with it is unimaginable in British politics today. Although the market's should not be worshipped, this is probably a good example of why you shouldn't be too ardent in your nudging of them for political reasons.

kasperni 5y ago

In 1997, the UK Treasury estimated the cost of Black Wednesday at £3.14 billion, which was revised to £3.3 billion in 2005 [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday#:~:text=In%201997%2C%20the%20UK%20Treasury,%C2%A313%E2%80%9327%20billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday#:~:text=In%201...).

parenthesis 5y ago

No mention of Stanley Druckenmiller. See lines 482 - 544 in a speech given by Druckenmiller https://gist.github.com/bluechoochoo/a034da52c64ac6fcb637 https://gist.github.com/bluechoochoo/a034da52c64ac6fcb637 where he talks about his and Soros' respective roles in the infamous trade.

blibble 5y ago

if this hadn't happened then the UK would have joined the euro brexit under the euro would have been all but impossible I wonder if Soros regrets "breaking the bank", especially given he was a huge remain supporter (donating vast amounts to the campaign)

DrBazza 5y ago
> if this hadn't happened then the UK would have joined the euro Interesting. Any links?
- blibble 5y ago
  that's what ERM1 was, fixing your exchange rate against the "European Currency Unit" and 1 ECU became 1 euro on 1 January 1999 now that the euro exists: joining ERM (version 2) is phase 1 of joining the euro
makomk 5y ago
Yeah, if not for this there's a good chance the UK would be part of the Euro and much more closely tied to the EU. I doubt this would've worked out well overall for the country though; there were other European countries which had similar issues maintaining their exchange rate and the underlying economic mismatches continued to cause economic crises once they joined the Euro.
bitshiftfaced 5y ago
Short sellers don't strike me as the type who regret doing something that made them a billion dollars.
TMWNN 5y ago
>if this hadn't happened then the UK would have joined the euro >brexit under the euro would have been all but impossible Not necessarily. The Guardian speculated in 2013 (<http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/02/britain-euro-what-if-joined http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/jun/...>) that if Britain had joined the Euro: * The mid-2000s British housing bubble, and its collapse in 2007, would have been even bigger. * Britain would have had to ask the IMF, ECB, and EU for loans. * The Tories would in 2010 have promised a referendum to leave the Euro and won a majority. Labour would have won fewer than 100 seats, and UKIP would have "made spectacular gains". * The anti-Euro side would have won the referendum, and the currency would have collapsed. * "after a deep and painful recession economic recovery began". * "Britain would have destroyed the euro on departure, and would now be on the point of leaving the EU altogether. The idea that Farage might be the next prime minister would be quite credible."

throwawayp0rn 5y ago

Wasn't technically the LPs who each made a fraction of that 1.1B while Soros and Druck got the 5 and 20 or whatever fees they charged them?

boringg 5y ago
True but the story doesn't read as well when you put it that way.

admax88qqq 5y ago

If I have to read "massive speculative attack" one more time... Almost every paragraph ends with this, and it takes 5 paragraphs just to start explaining what the attack was and how it worked. This wouldn't pass high school English.

criddell 5y ago
Your high school didn't grade essays based on engagement? /s
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  lol fair point
rvba 5y ago
Probably helps with SEO.
xenocratus 5y ago
This one might be better: https://priceonomics.com/the-trade-of-the-century-when-george-soros-broke/ https://priceonomics.com/the-trade-of-the-century-when-georg...

codeulike 5y ago

I remember listening to the news on the radio that day, the government changed the interest rate twice, from 10% to 12% at about 11am and then a couple of hours later up to 15%

motohagiography 5y ago

The myth is about Soros, but it was a network of largely U.S. investment banks that co-ordinated and piled on to raid the BoE. Consider that the GameStonks craze where people just really, really liked the stock got threatened with charges of market manipulation, almost took out Robinhood, with contagion exposure to Citadel with system wide risk, and caused back door intervention by Fed authorities and even the Whitehouse - Soros' payday is evidence for Balzac's adage that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. I have no doubt what he did would be absolutely criminal today. He went on to create the Open Society Foundations, which supported and co-ordinated aspects of the (then) progressive anti-globalization movement of the 90s I was involved in. At the time the movement was mostly anti-capitalist, uniting labor and civil society against (neo-liberal) trade agreements designed to exploit the poverty and authoritarianism of other countries and to hollow out western economies by exporting manufacturing jobs, and against exploitative policies by the IMF, who used loans to indebt and subordinate elected governments and force privatization and sale of their infrastructure to transnational corps and roll back environmental protection. (see, confessions of an economic hitman, nologo, etc.) Ostensibly noble causes. It almost seemed like a billionaire's noblesse oblige. Soros was the "good capitalist." The movements themselves failed after 9/11, and Occupy was a whimper in comparison to the battles of Seattle, Quebec City, Turin, and others. The US rust belt was exported destroyed in the 90's and 2000s, laying the ground for the populist revolt that created 2015 election result. However, his OSF foundations and network of NGOs flourished, installing progressive activists from the era in colleges and political parties, and other key institutions. Trouble is, these weren't working class labor organizers and anarcho-anti-capitalists, they were technocrats, equipped with an ideology whose specific endgame is central economic co-ordination, and it was nominally anti-capitalist in the sense that it is against the individualistic cultural aspects of smallholders and the autonomy and values small business provides, and that it uses critical theory as a tool to dissolve the bonds of societies. This is the kernel of truth beneath the layers of hallucinatory conspiracy theory. To me, Soros is just a visionary criminal who learned about totalitarianism from the inside during his youth, and has funded his own vision of that technocratic system. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's just what any billionaire criminal with a will to power seeking to build a empire would do, and imo, he has.

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago

rvba 5y ago

> Even better, Soros managed to convince other investors and investment banks (JP Morgan, Bank of America, Jones Investment, …) that the pound sterling would collapse in the event of a massive and coordinated attack. I wonder how this wouod be judged with current "insider trading" laws, but since it is a foreign country (even if ally) then probably nothing would be done. Also the article doesnt seem to mention that Bank of England could stop their losses and stop trying to save the pound. I have a feeling that actions of central banks are poorly discussed - in many ways those banks seem to be a source of recession (UK, Japan) or method of transfer of wealth to the rich (quantitative easing... seriously it is just pure evil).

not2b 5y ago
But Soros and his allies were not using confidential information; they were not insiders. I am not a fan of this kind of thing at all, but insider trading laws aren't relevant. As for your last point, yes, if the Bank of England had surrendered earlier they would have lost far less money and Soros and his allies would have made far less profit.
- rvba 5y ago
  Talking with a group of investors behind closed doors to agree and execute a strategy seems like a very obvious market manipulation.
  - not2b 5y ago
    Yes, but that isn't insider trading. Maybe it violates some other rule; IANAL.
helen___keller 5y ago
> I have a feeling that actions of central banks are poorly discussed You and I have very different definition of “poorly discussed”.
- rvba 5y ago

mc32 5y ago

If only every target had the wherewithal of the Porsche/Piech family which instead broke its shorters the world would be slightly a fairer place.

jddil 5y ago

The Day the Bank of England was caught in an artificial pumping scheme is way more accurate of a title. But I guess anything to smear Soros and the "left" gets upvoted to HN nowadays. Connection being the authoritative right sees Soros as the analog to the Koch bros.... not quite understanding we don't like capitalists anymore than the right likes socialists. But hey Soros === bad, leftist === bad so to the top of HN it goes. (please prove me wrong)

fallingfrog 5y ago
I agree, I don't think I'd call Soros a leftist- a liberal, maybe. But leftist is wrong- he's a wealthy capitalist, and leftist thought generally involves anticapitalist views. In fact leftists generally view center liberals as their most effective enemies. But yeah the right always tries to portray him as leftist to try to connect him with "antifa" as part of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
regularfry 5y ago
George Soros has been known as "The Man Who Broke The Bank of England" pretty much since it happened. It's a riff on a much earlier phrase, "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo", which has been around since the 19th century, referring to a gambler. It pre-dates the current right's antisemitic obsession with him by quite a long way, and I don't think it's been used as a pejorative term at all - more a mark of respect. But I could be wrong about that.
- lupire 5y ago
  The confusion in this thread is that some people think "breaking the bank" is an insult to the breaker, because the bank is the "good guy". It's a bit bizarre.

shrubble 5y ago

"I am there to make money; I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do" - George Soros Someone who explicitly says that as a teenager, he enjoyed his time working for the Nazis while they were looting those targeted, is not going to be shamed over taking $1 billion in a trade. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGWizajL7tA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGWizajL7tA compilation of clips from 60 Minutes interviews, etc. (from 3m45s he talks about his time helping to confiscate property from Hungarian Jews)

IAmEveryone 5y ago
Wikipedia: Tivadar [his father] saved not only his immediate family but also many other Hungarian Jews, and Soros later wrote that 1944 had been "the happiest [year] of his life," for it had given him the opportunity to witness his father's heroism.[ Stop lying.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  The idea that Soros, who was a 13-year old Hungarian Jew pretending to be christian as to not be murdered by the Nazis, somehow was sympathetic to the nazis is one of the laziest attempts at smearing someone I can remember.
  - lupire 5y ago
    The accusation is not that he sympathized with the Nazis. Quite the contrary, the accusation is that he has no sympathy for anyone. The accusation is that his worldview, was (and is) that he is responsible only for himself and he has no effect on affairs because if he didn't do [whatever] someone else would. He claims, on essence, that the events of the world is an unchangeable script, and the only control we have is which role we play. For an expert in markets, he claims stunning ignorance of the concept of marginal effects, and a non-stunning awareness of how to profit from amorality.
MerelyMortal 5y ago
I had thought poorly of George Soros based on other people's words, before reading all of the comments written thus far in this thread. Watching the video you linked, cemented my notion that Goeorge Soros is being treated as a scapegoat. Thank you for sharing the video, as I had never actually listened to him speak before. In that video, he seems like a logical and emotional person who can keep emotions in their proper perspective. Everything is nuanced, and he can navigate it. It looks like he has a high emotional IQ and intelligence IQ. Regarding the last segment of the video that contains an audio clip, it talks about personal development. Personal development can happen in terrible enviornments like the German occupation and Nazi confescation of Jewish assets. He was glad that he developed as opposed to not developing. It's a little odd that he called it a happy time though, and I am disappointed that he does not believe in God, but that doesn't mean he should be made a scapegoat for unwinding of financial problems started by others.

tim333 5y ago

An interesting and amusing take on it from Gyles Brandreth who was in the room on the UK government side of this https://youtu.be/dwRfVtdqfWY?t=85 https://youtu.be/dwRfVtdqfWY?t=85

neves 5y ago

In Brazil the alt-right calls Soros a lefist billionare that finances communism around the world. Does this craziness exist in other places of the world?

Qub3d 5y ago
George Soros conspiracy theories have been a dogwhistle for antisemitism used in right-leaning politics in the United States for decades.
- rhexs 5y ago
  - Qub3d 5y ago
    I am replying in the context of the parent comment asking if opinions of Soros in Brazil match the rest of the world. Which, well... they do. You are allowed to call George Soros evil, greedy, what-have-you. However, antisemitism is a real thing, and his name has been commonly invoked as part of conspiracy theories pushing it.
    - moltke 5y ago
lamp987 5y ago
He does finance political NGOs around the world, yes. Communism, definitely not.
Jtsummers 5y ago
Yes. It's a popular right-wing conspiracy theory here in the US, too. I've also had to disabuse several people of the notion that he was a Nazi.

boredumb 5y ago

England, Thailand, Malaysia....

steve76 5y ago

[dead]

Terry_Roll 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

screenbreakout 5y ago

Is there any chance someone could bet on the Swiss franc being undervalued to the extent it's central bank would have to accept a 1/1 parity with the euro... are there other similar cases of ("collusion") of individual entities that have outbet government policies to this or further extent?

omoikane 5y ago

Related: "When George Soros Broke the British Pound (2014)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21454383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21454383