New Delhi: George Soros makes money by devaluing currencies but uses it to aid philanthropic projects. He bankrolls causes that uphold democracy and justice, but in doing so gives shape to political agendas. He has been lauded as a saint and decried as a Holocaust denier.
ThePrint looks at the life of the only billionaire with his own foreign policy.
Who is George Soros?
Soros is ranked 178 on Forbes’ list of richest people in the world with a fortune that is currently valued at $8.3 billion. In 2018, The Financial Times had named him ‘Person of the Year’ while stating that he was chosen for both his achievements and values that he represents.
Born to a Jewish family in Budapest in 1930, Soros survived the Nazi occupation by living away from his family and using false documentation. In 1947, he moved to London to study at the London School of Economics where he was mentored by Karl Popper, an Austrian philosopher and professor.
After working at a firm in Wall Street, Soros started the Quantum Endowment Fund in 1969 — one of the most successful hedge funds of all time.
Soros was deeply influenced by Popper’s idea that only open, democratic societies can develop and flourish. This inspired the name of his philanthropic organisation ‘Open Society Foundation’, which he founded in 1984.
He has donated over $18 billion to the Open Society Foundation which has been used to fund scholarships for black students in South Africa and democratisation of Eastern Bloc countries, among other things.
Soros has five children from three marriages. He has published 14 books on internationalism and the global community till date.
University of Washington professor Daniel Bessner wrote in The Guardian that Soros is “a provocative and consistent thinker committed to pushing the world in a cosmopolitan direction in which racism, income inequality, American empire and the alienation of contemporary capitalism would be things of the past.”
Soros moved away from financial pursuits about a decade ago to focus on social and political causes, passing his hedge fund onto his sons in 2011. Earlier this week, he announced $500,000 to fund for a new anti-war think tank which he is co-founding with right-wing industrialist billionaire Charles Koch. As he nears 89, Soros’ focus has been on spending his remaining 800 crore on progressive and philanthropic causes.
The man who broke the Bank of England
To understand Soros, it’s important to understand where he made his money.
In 1992, Soros had predicted exactly when the British pound sterling would devalue. He borrowed millions of pounds from banks and other hedge funds, which he then used to buy German marks.
When the pound crashed he used short orders to buy back pounds with his marks, making a profit of $1 billion in one day. Britain tried to artificially inflate its currency and was forced to increase its interest rates by five per cent in one day, leading to the UK crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
His profit cost British taxpayers 340 crore pounds sterling.
“I think it’s true that we tend to benefit from the adversity of others,” Soros told The New York Times in 1994. “I don’t find that ironic. I find that inherent in my critical approach.”
Similarly, he bet $1 billion against the Thai baht in 1997, which may have helped engineer the East Asian currency crash. However, the Thailand government had made a series of financial missteps prior to the crash that invited speculators to bet against the baht, fearing that hedge funds would pull the same trick that Soros did in 1992.
Ironically, its actions invited precisely the sort of speculation they were afraid of and brought about the crash. (It should be noted that Julian Roberston’s Tiger Fund had also bet 300 crore against the baht, so Soros was not entirely to blame.)
When asked whether he felt any responsibility for the crash, Soros had said: “As a market participant, I don’t need to be concerned with the consequences of my actions.”
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Powerful enemies and conspiracy theories
Soros has been the target of several conspiracies, ranging from supporting Nazis to funding the global refugee crisis.
His father split up the family in Nazi-occupied Hungary and sent Soros to live with an agricultural official. He would accompany the official to work, which involved taking inventory of confiscated Jewish property. Soros refers to this as a traumatic experience that he did not have control over. But it is frequently used by critics to purport that he collaborated with the Nazis.
Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has repeatedly targeted Soros, most notably over his education initiatives and donations to EU refugee plans.
Orban was the recipient of a Soros education grant that allowed him to study at Oxford in 1989, but forced Soros’s Central European University out of Budapest by tightening regulations on foreign NGOs (it was called the “Stop Soros” law).
Orban had also made several moves to target civil society and quash left-wing ideals, fearing Soros’s high-profile liberal university would spread exactly the ideas that he was trying to suppress.
Orban has also ‘falsely alleged’ that Soros wanted to send millions of Muslim migrants in Hungary to derail his re-election campaign. He also used propaganda that portrayed Soros as a Nazi – using billboards that evoked anti-Semitic posters during World War II showing “the laughing Jew”.
Soros seems to have made enemies all over the world. The Open Society Foundation was thrown out of Russia in 2015 for its investigation into Soviet terror. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has opposed him for supporting pro-Palestine causes. Leaders from across Central Asia have criticised Soros for helping to incite revolutions in several countries, including Georgia and Azerbaijan.
While many of his political opponents have used Soros as a scapegoat to stoke nationalism or anti-American sentiment, they are not incorrect to say that his vast wealth has been used to intervene in domestic affairs.
Trump’s former campaign manager Steve Bannon had said that Soros was vilified because he is effective.
Good, evil, or something in between?
Soros had once said that “the connection between capitalism and democracy is tenuous at best.”
While many of the causes he has supported are admirable, his extensive donations to various Democrat candidates in the US, for example, exploits a system of capitalism that is inherently undemocratic.
Using wealth to buy political outcomes, even if those are sometimes objectively beneficial for the common citizen, is also cheating the system.
Because Soros is not an elected official, he is not held accountable for his actions. Any politician making similar policy decisions must do so under the checks and balances of the legislative, the judiciary, and civil society. Until the world finds a way to regulate Soros, he will continue to unilaterally make political decisions that will fundamentally shape the world.
That can be a good or a bad thing.
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Nazi Globalist #GeorgeSoros pays to have another whitewash propaganda piece paint him as a troubled saint… article doesn’t talk about Nazi Soros helping to confiscate Jewish property or ratting out Jews in hiding during Nazi occupation, also doesn’t talk about how Nazi Soros devaluing currency has caused millions to go broke and become poor or homeless just so he can obtain more power and control.
He cashed out of gold a few years ago, at the top of the bull market.