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George Soros

 
Who2 Biography: George Soros, Business Personality / Philanthropist
 
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  • Born: 12 August 1930
  • Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
  • Best Known As: Quantum Fund billionaire and "open society" advocate

George Soros uses the wealth he amassed as a financier to support liberal U.S. political candidates and pro-democracy movements worldwide. As a teenage Hungarian immigrant at the London School of Economics, he studied finance and the "open society" theories of philosopher Karl Popper, an advocate of civil and political liberties. After brokerage work in London and New York, he started in 1969 what became the Quantum Fund, one of the world's first hedge funds. It eventually paid 4,000-fold on initial investments and made Soros a billionaire. His knack for seeing trends and acting on them with gutsy marketplace gambits sometimes caused controversy. He was called "the man who broke the Bank of England" for the role his currency trades played in the 1992 "Black Wednesday" crash of the British pound; in 2002 he was convicted of insider trading in France. He turned philanthropist in the 1970s through what is now an international network of foundations under the umbrella of the Open Society Institute. His first foray into U.S. presidential politics came in 2004, when he threw millions of personal dollars behind efforts to unseat George W. Bush. In 2007 he declared support for candidate Barack Obama.

His ethnically Jewish parents changed their family's name from Schwartz to Soros as one of their assimilation strategies to avoid persecution by the forces of Adolf Hitler in Hungary. He says his lifelong attraction to civil freedoms is due in part to his first-hand view of Nazi, and, later, Communist oppression there... Soros has been married and divorced twice: to Annaliese Witchak (1959-1978) and to Susan Weber (1983-2004). His five children are Robert (born 1963), Andrea (1965), Jonathan (1970), Alexander (1985) and Gregory (1989).

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Business Biographies: George Soros
 
Home > Library > Business & Finance > Business Biographies
(1930–)

Chairman, Soros Fund Management

Nationality: American.

Born: August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary.

Education: London School of Economics, BS, 1952; Oxford University, DCL, 1990.

Family: Son of Tivadar (lawyer) and Elisabeth Szucs; immigrated to United States, 1956; naturalized citizen; married Annaliese Witschak on September 17, 1960 (divorced June 1983); children: three; married Susan Weber (former art magazine publisher who ran Bard College's Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Manhattan) on June 19, 1983; children: two.

Career: F. M. Mayer, 1956–1959, arbitrage trader; Wertheim & Company, 1959–1963, analyst; Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, 1963–1973, vice president; Soros Fund Management, 1973–2000, sole proprietor; Soros Fund Management, 1996–, chairman.

Awards: Honored by Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, New York, 1990; Laurea Honoris Causa (highest honor, in recognition of efforts to promote open societies throughout the world), University of Bologna, 1995.

Publications: Opening the Soviet System, 1990; Underwriting Democracy, 1991; The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market, 1994; The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, 1998; Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, 2000; George Soros on Globalization, 2002; The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, 2004.

Address: Soros Fund Management, 888 Seventh Avenue, 33rd Floor, Suite 3300, New York, New York 10016-0001; http://soros.org.

In the early 2000s the billionaire financial, philanthropic, and philosophical speculator George Soros was known on Wall Street as the greatest hedge-fund investor in modern times. (Wealthy individuals and institutions often employ hedge funds as an aggressive strategy for investments, with managers using such techniques as arbitrage, derivatives, leverage, program trading, selling short, and swaps.) Soros's man agement style was that of a short-term speculator who made huge gambles on the directions of financial markets. In 2000, at the age of seventy and after a career of successfully speculat ing on currency with billions of dollars of other people's money, Soros retired from active investing within his company, Soros Fund Management, a private investment management firm.

At the time Soros began to invest with his Quantum Fund in 1969, an initial investment of $1,000 would have grown into $4 million by the time Soros retired. In fact, the Quantum Fund was generally recognized as one of the most success ful investment funds ever, returning, on average, 31 percent annually throughout its 30-year history (up to 1999). After making billions of dollars and often moving entire financial markets, Soros—who was sometimes called "Soros the Speculator"—turned to working full-time through his foundations to give away all of his wealth. Not a man to compromise his principles, Soros actively made himself a powerful and (sometimes) the most infuriating philanthropist of modern times.

Surviving Nazism and Communism

Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930 and survived the Holocaust despite the German occupation of his country in the spring of 1944. His father, Tivadar, a Jewish attorney, had already survived one deportation as a prisoner in Russia during the Russian Revolution. To avoid the Nazis as they gathered up Jews and deported them to concentration camps, Tividar bought false identity papers for his family members, who then separated and went into hiding.

Soros, then fourteen years old, helped his father formulate thousands of fake documents for many of their fleeing countrymen. Soros remembered that his father would provide free documents for people he knew or who were in immediate danger, would request money only to cover his expenses from people whom he felt a moral obligation to help, and would ask for as much money as the wealthy could afford. Soros reflected on his father's honesty during the Holocaust, but he also remembered the number of laws his father had to break in order to provide safety for his family and countrymen. Soros learned the art of survival from his father, and he came out of the experience resolved to be undaunted by challenges.

Early Education and Development

Soros left Soviet-controlled Communist Hungary in 1947 for London, where he attended the London School of Economics. There he studied with the philosopher Karl Popper, the originator of the term "open society." (Unlike a dictatorship, an "open society" is one in which debates and arguments are encouraged.) Popper influenced Soros's thinking and ultimately his investment and philanthropic activities.

Soros graduated in 1952 but could find only unskilled jobs. He eventually secured an entry-level position with an investment bank in London. In 1956 he moved to the United States, where he worked as an arbitrage trader with F. M. Mayer from 1956 to 1959 and as an analyst with Wertheim and Company from 1959 to 1963. Throughout this time, but mostly in the 1950s, Soros developed a philosophy of "reflexivity" based on the ideas of Popper. (Reflexivity, as used by Soros, is the belief that self-awareness is part of the environment. Actions tend to cause disruptions in economic equilibriums, which may run counter to the progression of free-market systems.) Soros realized, however, that he would not make any money from the concept of reflexivity until he went into investing on his own. He began to investigate how to deal in investments. 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 a philosopher or 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.

The Quantum Fund

By the end of the 1960s Soros had thoroughly studied the discipline of arbitrage, the simultaneous buying and selling of instruments in different investment markets in order to profit from differences between the transactions' prices (that is, buying the underpriced assets and selling the overpriced ones). Using this new skill and his concept of reflexivity, which promised that rising prices would continue to rise (even up to a point that ran counter to traditional economic analyses), Soros realized that he could move money around the world as a way to profit from the constant rise and fall of currencies.

Through the Quantum Fund, which was registered outside the United States to give it maximum trading flexibility, Soros took major global positions for or against currencies, derivatives, commodities, emerging markets, stocks and bonds, private markets, and almost anything he thought would be financially advantageous to him. Soros then used massive amounts of leverage to strengthen his positions. Although this strategy was enormously volatile, Soros's results were outstanding, and he accumulated a large fortune through his management of the fund. At the same time, he became a target for various bankers and government leaders who perceived that they were being harmed by his actions. However, he was also renowned publicly as "the world's greatest money manager" in such publications as Institutional Investor, which in 1981 put him on its cover.

The Philanthropist

By the end of the 1970s Soros was very rich but also very unhappy and unfulfilled. He quit his business relationship with his long-time investment partner, Jim Rogers, and divorced his first wife, Annaliese; he likewise felt that he had failed in his relationship with his children. In a small apartment in Manhattan, Soros became a recluse. After profiting so much in earlier years, Soros began to lose money and felt guilty about his actions. He sought out therapeutic counseling but did not solve his personal problems until he discovered philanthropy.

In the 1980s Soros began to develop his philanthropic empire. Initially, he pursued endeavors in central and eastern Europe. Near the end of the cold war (at about the end of the 1980s), for instance, Soros supplied organizations in his native Hungary with photocopiers, to counter the censorship of the Soviet Union. As democratic countries were set up across Europe after the fall of the former Soviet Union, Soros acted as a type of central bank for countries in need. He established philanthropic offices in eastern European countries, providing hundreds of millions of dollars to help individuals and countries struggle to free themselves from the old Soviet bloc. After Russia reorganized as an independent country, Soros invested $100 million in scientific and technological endeavors in that country. In Yugoslavia, at about the same time, Soros spent $50 million to help revive war-torn Sarajevo.

Soros's philanthropic headquarters, the Open Society Institute, in New York directed a network of foundations located in numerous nations and employed about 1,300 people. Soros spent billions of dollars funding Open Society foundations around the world, which promoted political pluralism, financed education, strengthened freedom of speech and media, and defended human rights projects.

"The Man Who Broke the Bank of England"

Although he was well known in Europe in the early 1990s, Soros did not feel that he had much financial clout in the Western Hemisphere. When President George H. W. Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ignored his plan to rebuild countries destroyed by the demise of the former Soviet Union, Soros decided that he would create a public personality that leaders would heed. He realized that he possessed the key for formulating his plan when he heard a German bank president talk about possible instability among European currencies.

In September 1992 Soros bet $10 billion that the British pound would fall. First, he sold the Italian lira short, and it proceeded to devalue. Then he made a similar move with respect to the British pound, assuming that it would decline against other currencies. In a twenty-four-hour period Soros reaped $1 billion, and he eventually made $2 billion on the deal. This risk-taking approach earned him international acclaim as he came to be known as "the Man Who Broke the Bank of England." Soros had established himself as a man to contend with, a man to be heard by presidents and prime ministers.

Moving Markets

From this point on, Soros held a certain godlike status with many traders, who believed that he could move markets with a wave of his hand. Leaders of countries feared that if he traded against their currencies, he could cause an economic crisis. In fact, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia accused Soros of destabilizing his country's economy during the Asian financial panic of 1997–1998. Mohamad also declared to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a regional political and trade organization, that Soros had committed a crime when he "attacked" currencies after leaders of Southeast Asian governments recognized the Burmese military regime, which Soros opposed for humanitarian reasons. For better or worse, Soros had gained international status as a man who could change major sectors of the world's financial market.

Losses Lead to Shift in Strategy

By 1998, however, Soros had lost $2 billion in the collapse of the Russian economy. The situation turned even worse in 1999, when Soros bet that fledgling Internet stocks would fall. He lost about $700 million more when the emerging sector continued to rise. When he did buy technology stocks, the real downturn that he had predicted a year earlier finally occurred. He lost almost $3 billion when the NASDAQ crashed in the spring of 2000. At that time, Soros withdrew from actively managing his Quantum Fund. In July of that year Soros merged his flagship Quantum Fund with the Quantum Emerging Growth Fund to form the Quantum Endowment Fund, a switch from high-risk speculation to conservative investment.

Impact on Problems in the United States

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Soros was concerned with certain problems in the United States, including ineffective drug laws, containment of mental patients in prisons, unfair immigration laws, welfare reform, and inadequate care for the dying. Soros gave $15 million over five years (toward the end of the 1990s) to groups that opposed the U.S. war on drugs; provided $5 million in 1997 to his Center on Crime, Communities, and Culture, which gives grants to service and research organizations; committed $50 million to the Emma Lazarus Fund to help fellow immigrants acquire full citizenship and to campaign for their rights; and dedicated $20 million to improving the care of the dying.

The Global Reach of Philanthropy

Soros took up active philanthropy in 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa. He founded the Open Society Fund in 1979, the Soros Foundation-Hungary in 1984, and the Soros Foundation-Soviet Union in 1987. As of 2004 he was chairman of the Open Society Institute and founder of a network of philanthropic organizations that were active in more than 50 countries. Based primarily in central and eastern Europe and Russia, but also in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States, these foundations were dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society through the support of a variety of educational, cultural, and economic restructuring activities.

In 1992 Soros founded Central European University, with its primary campus in Budapest and other campuses in Prague and Warsaw. The university was designed to offer postgraduate programs in art history, economics, history, political science, and the social sciences and served as the centerpiece of Soros's educational initiatives in eastern Europe. In 2001, at the age of seventy, Soros retired from active investing, although he retained the chairmanship of Soros Fund Management. He had given away $2.8 billion to his foundations but was still worth some $5 billion. Soros promised to give away the rest of the money before he turned eighty.

Sources for Further Information

Kaufman, Michael T., Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, New York: Knopf, 2002.

Slater, Robert, Soros: The Life, Times, and Trading Secrets of the World's Greatest Investor, Burr Ridge, Ill.: Irwin Professional Publisher, 1996.

—William Arthur Atkins

 
Investment Dictionary: George Soros
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Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930, George Soros is considered by many to be one of the world's greatest investors. A famous hedge fund manager, Soros managed the Quantum Fund, a fund that achieved an average annual return of 30% from 1970-2000. Besides his investing prowess, Soros is also known for his vast philanthropic activities, donating billions of dollars to various causes through the Soros Foundation.

Investopedia Says:
Soros is most famous for his single-day gain of US$1 billion on Sept 6, 1992, which he made by short selling the British pound. At the time, England was part of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, a fixed exchange-rate system which included other European countries. The other countries were pressuring England to devalue its currency in relation to the other countries in the system or to leave the system. England resisted the devaluation, but with continued pressure from the fixed system and speculators in the currency market, England floated its currency and the value of the pound suffered.

By leveraging the value of his fund, Soros was able to take a $10 billion short position on the pound which made him US$1 billion. This trade is considered one of the greatest trades of all time.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: George Soros
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(born Aug. 12, 1930, Budapest, Hung.) Hungarian-U.S. financier. He left his native Hungary in 1944 and settled in London in 1947, where he studied and joined a merchant bank. He moved to New York City in 1956 and initially worked as an analyst of European securities. By 1979 his daring investments and currency speculation brought large profits, some of which he used to found Soros Foundations, dedicated to creating open societies in many eastern European countries and Russia. Other Soros programs have been dedicated to enlarging public debate on a wide range of controversial issues. In 1992 he reached new heights of wealth, making a profit of about $1 billion when Britain devalued the pound sterling, but in 1998 he suffered large losses from currency speculation in Russia.

For more information on George Soros, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: George Soros
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George Soros (sôr'ōs) , 1930–, American stock trader and philanthropist, b. Budapest, Hungary, as George Schwartz. He studied under Sir Karl Popper at the London School of Economics (grad. 1952). He emigrated from Hungary to Great Britain (1947) and then to the United States (1956). Soros mostly worked as a financial analyst, and in 1969 he founded the first of his offshore hedge funds. His Quantum funds grew in value tremendously, partly through speculation in foreign currency. He earned (1992) $1 billion on the fall of the British pound and notoriety as “the man who broke the Bank of England.” In the late 1990s, financial analysts and government officials charged that this speculation had helped destabilize Asian and Latin American national economies. His reputation for financial acumen was tarnished somewhat, however, when the value of the funds fell 20% in early 2000.

As president of the Soros Management Fund, he has used his wealth to create a network of wealthy foundations, many of which are intended to aid former Communist countries in creating the kind of anti-Marxist “open society” advocated by Popper. Others fund health initiatives and aid immigrants in the United States. He also established (1991) the Central European Univ., based in Budapest. In the United States, he has funded political campaigns, most notably by organizations opposed to President George W. Bush. Soros has written several books, including Opening the Soviet System (1990; rev. ed. 1991), The Alchemy of Finance (1994), The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998), Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000), and The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (2003).

Bibliography

See his autobiography Soros on Soros (with B. Wien and K. Koenen, 1995); biographies by R. Slater (1995) and M. T. Kaufman (2002).

 
Quotes By: George Soros
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Quotes:

"Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes."

 
Wikipedia: George Soros
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"Soros" redirects here. For other meanings see Soros (disambiguation).
George Soros

George Soros speaking in Malaysia
Born August 12, 1930 (1930-08-12) (age 78)
Budapest, Hungary
Alma mater London School of Economics
Occupation Entrepreneur, Currency Trader, investor, philosopher, philanthropist, political activist
Net worth ▲ $11.0 billion (Forbes)[1]
Spouse(s) Twice divorced (Annaliese Witschak and Susan Weber Soros)
Children Robert, Andrea, Jonathan, Alexander, Gregory
Website
www.georgesoros.com

George Soros (pronounced /ˈsɔroʊs/ or /ˈsɔrəs/,[2] Hungarian: [ˈʃoroʃ]) (born August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary, as György Schwartz) is an American currency speculator, stock investor, businessman, philanthropist, and political activist.[3]

Forbes lists Soros as the 29th-richest person in the world, with a net worth estimated at $11.0 billion. Soros has given $6 billion to various causes since 1979.[1]

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.[4] 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. 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. 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.

Contents

Biography

Family

George Soros is the son of the Esperantist writer Tivadar Soros. Tivadar (also known as Teodoro) was a Hungarian Jew, who was a prisoner of war during and after World War I and eventually escaped from Russia to rejoin his family in Budapest.[5][6]

The family changed its name in 1936 from Schwartz to Soros, in response to growing anti-semitism with the rise of Fascism. Tivadar liked the new name because it is a palindrome and because it has a meaning. Although the specific meaning is left unstated in Kaufmann's biography, in Hungarian, soros means "next in line, or designated successor", and in Esperanto, it means "will soar".[7] His son George was taught to speak Esperanto from birth and thus is one of the rare native Esperanto speakers. George Soros later said that he grew up in a Jewish home, and that his parents were cautious with their religious roots.[8]

George Soros has been married and divorced twice, to Annaliese Witschak, and to Susan Weber Soros. He has five children: Robert, Andrea, Jonathan (with his first wife, Annaliese); Alexander, Gregory (with his second wife, Susan). His elder brother, Paul Soros, a private investor and philanthropist, is a retired engineer, who headed Soros Associates, an international engineering firm based in New York, and established the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for Young Americans[9][10]. George Soros' nephew Peter Soros, a son of Paul Soros, is married to the former Flora Fraser, a daughter of Lady Antonia Fraser and the late Sir Hugh Fraser, and a stepdaughter of the late 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter.[11]

Native Hungary, and move to England

Soros was thirteen years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany took military control over Hungary[12]. For two days, Soros worked for the Jewish Council[5], which 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 to writer Michael Lewis:

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.[13]

To avoid his son's being apprehended by the Nazis, Soros's father paid a Ministry of Agriculture employee to have Soros spend the summer of 1944 living with him and posing as the godson. Young Soros had to hide his Jewishness even as the official was overseeing the confiscation of Jewish property.[14]

In the following year, Soros survived the battle of Budapest in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city. Soros first traded currencies during the Hungarian hyperinflation of 1945–1946.

Soros emigrated to England in 1947 and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952. While a student of the philosopher Karl Popper, Soros funded himself by taking jobs as a railway porter and a waiter at Quaglino's restaurant where he was told that with hard work he might one day become head waiter. He eventually secured an entry-level position with London merchant bank Singer & Friedlander.

Move to the United States

In 1956 he moved to New York City, where he worked as an arbitrage trader with F. M. Mayer from 1956 to 1959 and as an analyst with Wertheim and Company from 1959 to 1963. Throughout this time, Soros developed a philosophy of "reflexivity" based on the ideas of Karl Popper. Reflexivity, as used by Soros, is the belief that the action of beholding the valuation of any market by its participants, affects said valuation of the market in a procyclical 'virtuous or vicious' circle.[15]

Soros realized, however, that he would not make any money from the concept of reflexivity until he went into investing on his own. He began to investigate how to deal in investments. 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 a philosopher or 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.[15]

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. He has stated that his intent was to earn enough money on Wall Street to support himself as an author and philosopher - he calculated that $500,000 after five years would be possible and adequate.

He is also a former member of the Carlyle Group.[15]

Business

Soros is the founder of Soros Fund Management. In 1970 he co-founded the Quantum Fund with Jim Rogers, which created the bulk of the Soros fortune. Rogers retired from the fund in 1980. Other partners have included Victor Niederhoffer and Stanley Druckenmiller.

In 2007, the Quantum Fund returned almost 32%, netting Soros $2.9 billion.[16]

Currency speculation

On Black Wednesday (September 16, 1992), Soros became immediately famous when his fund 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."

The Times of Monday, October 26, 1992, quoted Soros as saying: "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."

Stanley Druckenmiller, who traded under Soros, originally saw the weakness in the pound. "Soros' contribution was pushing him to take a gigantic position," in accord with Druckenmiller's own research and instincts.[17][18]

In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad accused Soros of using the wealth under his control to punish ASEAN for welcoming Myanmar as a member.

Public predictions

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. As he states:

I have a record of crying wolf…. I did it first in The Alchemy of Finance (in 1987), then in The Crisis of Global Capitalism (in 1998) and now in this book. So it's three books predicting disaster. (After) the boy cried wolf three times . . . the wolf really came.[19]

He ascribes his own success to being able to recognize when his predictions are wrong.

I'm only rich because I know when I'm wrong… I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes. I very often used to get backaches due to the fact that I was wrong. Whenever you are wrong you have to fight or [take] flight. When [I] make the decision, the backache goes away.[19]

George Soros said the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis. [20] 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.

Insider trading conviction

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.[21]

His insider trading conviction was upheld by the highest court in France on June 14, 2006.[22] 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.[23]

Sports

In 2005, Soros was a minority partner in a group that tried to buy the Washington Nationals of the National League. Some Republican lawmakers suggested that they might tamper with baseball's antitrust exemption if Soros had any interest in any baseball team.[24] In 2008, Soros' name was associated with AS Roma, an Italian soccer team but the club was not sold. Soros was also a financial backer of Washington Soccer L.P., the group that owned the operating rights to Major League Soccer club D.C. United when the league was founded in 1995, but the group lost these rights in 2000.[25]

Philanthropy

Main article: List of projects supported by George Soros
George Soros (left) and James H. Billington.

Soros has been active as a philanthropist since the 1970s, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa, and began funding dissident movements behind the iron curtain.

Soros' philanthropic funding includes efforts to promote non-violent democratization in the post-Soviet states. These efforts, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, occur primarily through the Open Society Institute (OSI) and national Soros Foundations, which sometimes go under other names (such as the Stefan Batory Foundation in Poland). As of 2003, PBS estimated that he had given away a total of $4 billion.[21] The OSI says it has spent about $400 million annually in recent years.

Time magazine in 2007 cited two specific projects - $100 million toward Internet infrastructure for regional Russian universities; and $50 million for the Millennium Promise to eradicate extreme poverty in Africa - while noting that Soros has given $742 million to projects in the U.S., and given away a total of more than $6 billion.[26]

Other notable projects have included aid to scientists and universities throughout Central and Eastern Europe, help to civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and Transparency International. Soros also pledged an endowment of €420 million to the Central European University (CEU). The Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and his microfinance bank Grameen Bank received support from the OSI.

According to National Review[27] the 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. An OSI spokeswoman said "it appeared to us at that time that there was a right-to-counsel issue worthy of our support."

In September 2006, Soros departed from his characteristic sponsorship of democracy building programs, pledging $50 million to the Jeffrey Sachs-led Millennium Promise to help eradicate extreme poverty in Africa. Noting the connection between bad governance and poverty, he remarked on the humanitarian value of the project.[28]

He received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York), the University of Oxford in 1980, the Corvinus University of Budapest, and Yale University in 1991. Soros also received the Yale International Center for Finance Award from the Yale School of Management in 2000 as well as the Laurea Honoris Causa, the highest honor of the University of Bologna in 1995.

Political donations and activism

Activities in the United States

In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003,[29] 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[30] delivered at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The online transcript to this speech received many hits after Dick Cheney accidentally referred to FactCheck.org as "factcheck.com" in the Vice Presidential debate, causing the owner of that domain to redirect all traffic to Soros's site.[31]

Soros was not a large donor to US political causes until the U.S. presidential election, 2004, but according to the Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2003-2004 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 groups dedicated to defeating President Bush. (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.) 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 which aims to support the goals of the U.S. Democratic Party.[32]

Soros supported the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which was intended to end "soft money" contributions to federal election campaigns[citation needed]. Soros has made soft money donations to 527 organizations that he says do not raise the same corruption issues as donations directly to the candidates or political parties.

Activities in Eastern Europe

According to the New Statesman's Neil Clark, Soros's role was crucial in the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe. Clark states that from 1979, Soros distributed $3m a year to dissidents including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union; in 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent media.[33]

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Soros' funding has continued to play an important role in the former Soviet sphere. His funding and organization of Georgia's Rose Revolution was considered crucial to its success by Russian and Western observers, although Soros has said that his role has been "greatly exaggerated."[34] Alexander Lomaia, Secretary of the Georgian Security Council and former Minister of Education and Science, is a former Executive Director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros Foundation,) overseeing a staff of 50 and a budget of $2,500,000.[35]

Former Georgian Foreign Minister Salomé Zourabichvili wrote that institutions like the Soros Foundation were the cradle of democratisation and that all the NGOs which gravitated around the Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. She opines that after the revolution the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.[36]

Soros' support of pro-democracy and pro-transparency NGOs has been decried in several semi-authoritarian countries: Some Soros-backed pro-democracy initiatives have been banned in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.[37] Ercis Kurtulus, head of the Social Transparency Movement Association (TSHD) in Turkey, said in an interview that "Soros carried out his will in Ukraine and Georgia by using these NGOs...Last year Russia passed a special law prohibiting NGOs from taking money from foreigners. I think this should be banned in Turkey as well."[38] In 1997, Soros had to close his foundation in Belarus after it was fined $3 million by the government for "tax and currency violations". According to the New York Times, the Belarussian president Aleksandr Lukashenko has been widely criticized in the West and in Russia for his efforts to control the Belarus Soros Foundation and other independent NGOs and to suppress civil and human rights. Soros called the fines part of a campaign to "destroy independent society".[39]

June 2009 donated Soros $100m to Central Europe and Eastern Europe to counter the impact of the economic crisis on the poor, voluntary groups and non-government organsations.[40]

Activities in Africa

The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa is a Soros-affiliated organization. [9] Its director for Zimbabwe is Godfrey Kanyenze, who also directs the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), which was the main force behind the founding of the Movement for Democratic Change, the principal indigenous organization promoting Regime change in Zimbabwe.

Drug policy reform

Soros has funded worldwide efforts to promote drug policy reform. In 2008, Soros donated $400,000 to help fund a successful ballot measure in the state of Massachusetts known as the Massachusetts Sensible Marijuana Policy Initiative which decriminalized possession of less than 1 oz (28g) of marijuana in the state. Soros has also funded similar measures in California, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada and Maine. [41] Among the drug decriminalization groups that have received funding from Soros are the Lindesmith Center and Drug Policy Foundation.[42]

Soros donated $1.4 million to publicity efforts to support California's Proposition 5 in 2008, a failed ballot measure that would have expanded drug rehabilitation programs as alternatives to prison for persons convicted of non-violent drug-related offenses. [10] [11]

Death and dying

The Project on Death in America, active from 2001-2003, was one of the Open Society Institute's projects, which sought to "understand and transform the culture and experience of dying and bereavement."[43] 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.[44] In the same speech, he also endorsed the Oregon Death with Dignity Act,[45] the campaign for which he helped fund.[46]

Philosophy

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Education and beliefs

Soros has a keen interest in philosophy, and has stated that he entered finance to be able to support himself as a philosopher. His philosophical outlook is influenced by Karl Popper, under whom he studied at the London School of Economics (LSE). His Open Society Institute is named after Popper's two volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, and Soros's ongoing philosophical commitment to the principle of fallibilism (that anything he believes may in fact be wrong, and is therefore to be questioned and improved) stems from Popper's philosophy. In an interview with 60 Minutes, Soros identified himself as an irreligious atheist.[47]

Reflexivity, financial markets, and economic theory

Soros' writings focus heavily on the concept of reflexivity, where the biases of individuals enter into market transactions, potentially changing the perception of fundamentals of the economy. Soros argues that such transitions in the perceptions of fundamentals of the economy are typically marked by disequilibrium rather than equilibrium, and that the conventional economic theory of the market (the 'efficient market hypothesis') does not apply in these situations. Soros has popularized the concepts of dynamic disequilibrium, static disequilibrium, and near-equilibrium conditions.[15]

Reflexivity is based on three main ideas[15]:

  1. Reflexivity is best observed under special conditions where investor bias grows and spreads throughout the investment arena. Examples of factors that may give rise to this bias include (a) equity leveraging or (b) the trend-following habits of speculators.
  2. Reflexivity appears intermittently since it is most likely to be revealed under certain conditions; i.e., the equilibrium process's character is best considered in terms of probabilities.
  3. Investors' observation of and participation in the capital markets may at times influence valuations AND fundamental conditions or outcomes.

A current example of reflexivity in modern financial markets is that of the debt and equity of housing markets. Lenders began to make more money available to more people in the 1990s to buy houses. More people bought houses with this larger amount of money, thus increasing the prices of these houses. Lenders looked at their balance sheets which not only showed that they had made more loans, but that their equity backing the loans--the value of the houses, had gone up (because more money was chasing the same amount of housing, relatively). Thus they lent out more money because their balance sheets looked good, and prices went up more, and they lent more. This was further amplified by public policy. Many governments see home ownership as a positive outcome and so first home owners grant and other financial subsidies - or influences to buy a home such as the exemption of a primary residence from capital gains taxation - mean that house purchases were seen as a good thing. Prices increased rapidly, and lending standards were relaxed. The salient issue regarding reflexivity is that it explains why markets gyrate over time, and do not just stick to equilibrium--they tend to overshoot or undershoot.[15]

View of potential problems in the free market system

Despite working as an investor and currency speculator, he argues that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries. Soros blames many of the world's problems on the failures inherent in what he characterizes as market fundamentalism. His opposition to many aspects of globalization has made him a controversial figure.

Victor Niederhoffer said of Soros: "Most of all, George believed even then in a mixed economy, one with a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest."

Soros claims to draw a distinction between being a participant in the market and working to change the rules that market participants must follow. According to Mahathir bin Mohamed, Prime Minister of Malaysia from July 1981 to October 2003, Soros - as the hedge fund chief of Quantum - may have been partially responsible for the economic crash in 1997 of East Asian markets when the Thai currency relinquished its peg to the US dollar. According to Mahathir, in the three years leading to the crash, Soros invested in short-term speculative investment in East Asian stock markets and real estate, then divested with 'indecent haste' at the first signs of currency devaluation. [48] Soros replied, saying that Mahathir was using him "as a scapegoat for his own mistakes", that Mahathir's promises to ban currency trading (which Malaysian finance officials hastily retracted) were "a recipe for disaster" and that Mahathir "is a menace to his own country".[49]

In an interview regarding the economic crisis of 2008, Soros referred to it as the most serious crisis since the 1930s. According to Soros, market fundamentalism with its assumption that markets will correct themselves with no need for government intervention in financial affairs has been “some kind of an ideological excess”. In Soros´ view, the markets´ moods — a “mood” of the markets being a prevailing bias or optimism/pessimism with which the markets look at reality — “actually can reinforce themselves so that there are these initially self-reinforcing but eventually unsustainable and self-defeating boom/bust sequences or bubbles”.[50]

Views on antisemitism

At a Jewish forum in New York City, November 5, 2003, 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.[51]

In a subsequent article for The New York Review of Books, Soros emphasized that

I do not subscribe to the myths propagated by enemies of Israel and I am not blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism predates the birth of Israel. Neither Israel's policies nor the critics of those policies should be held responsible for anti-Semitism. At the same time, I do believe that attitudes toward Israel are influenced by Israel's policies, and attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby's success in suppressing divergent views.[52]

Books

Authored or co-authored

  • The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means.
  • The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror (PublicAffairs, 2006) ISBN 1-58648-359-1
  • With MoveOn.org, MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004 ISBN 1-930722-29-X
  • The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (PublicAffairs, 2003) ISBN 1-58643-217-3 (paperback; PublicAffairs, 2004; ISBN 1-58648-292-0)
  • George Soros on Globalization (PublicAffairs, 2002) ISBN 1-58648-125-8 (paperback; PublicAffairs, 2005; ISBN 1-52648-278-5)
  • Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2001) ISBN 1-58648-039-7
  • With Mark Amadeus Notturno, Science and the Open Society: The Future of Karl Popper's Philosophy (Central European University Press, 2000) ISBN 963-9116-69-6 (paperback: Central European University Press, 2000; ISBN 943-9116-70-X)
  • The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (PublicAffairs, 1998) ISBN 1-891220-27-4
  • Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (John Wiley, 1995) ISBN 0-471-12014-6 (paperback; Wiley, 1995; ISBN 0-371-11977-6)
  • Underwriting Democracy: Encouraging Free Enterprise and Democratic Reform Among the Soviets and in Eastern Europe (Free Press, 1991) ISBN 0-02-930285-4 (paperback; PublicAffairs, 2004; ISBN 1-58948-227-0)
  • Opening the Soviet System (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990) ISBN 0-297-82155-9 (paperback: Perseus Books, 1996; ISBN 0-8133-1205-1)
  • The Alchemy of Finance (Simon & Schuster, 1988) ISBN 0-671-66338-4 (paperback: Wiley, 2003; ISBN 0-471-44549-5)

Biographies

  • Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire by Michael T. Kaufman (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) ISBN 0-375-40585-2
  • Soros: The World's Most Influential Investor by Robert Slater (McGraw-Hill Professional, 2009) ISBN 978-0-07-160844-2

Journalism

Authored

About

Scholarly perspectives

  • Bryant, C. G. A. (2002). "George Soros's theory of reflexivity: a comparison with the theories of Giddens and Beck and a consideration of its practical value". Economy and Society 31 (1): 112–131. doi:10.1080/03085140120109277. 
  • Cross, R.; Strachan, D. (1997). "On George Soros and economic analysis". Kyklos 50: 561–574. doi:10.1111/1467-6435.00030. 
  • Pettis, Michael (2001). The Volatility Machine: Emerging Economies and the Threat of Financial Collapse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195143302. 
  • Stone, Diane (2007). "Market Principles, Philanthropic Ideals and Public Service Values: The Public Policy Program at the Central European University". PS: Political Science and Politics: 545–551. 

Speeches

Commentaries

Interviews

References

  1. ^ a b The World's Billionaires -#29 George Soros, Forbes, March 5, 2008
  2. ^ Authors@Google: George Soros
  3. ^ William Shawcross, "Turning Dollars into Change," Time Magazine, September 1, 1997
  4. ^ George Soros, A Biographical Note, dated May 2006.
  5. ^ a b Kaufman, Michael T., Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, Alfred A. Knopf: 2002
  6. ^ Soros, George (2008). The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. PublicAffairs. p. 13. ISBN 1586486837. http://books.google.com/books?id=F_aBKX4AnLUC&q=Tivadar#search_anchor. 
  7. ^ Kaufman, Michael T., Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, Alfred A. Knopf: 2002, p. 24
  8. ^ Slater, R.: "Soros: The Unauthorized Biography", page 30.
  9. ^ "Background and History" (Web). Paul and Dora Soros Fellowships for Young Americans. http://www.pdsoros.org/overview/. Retrieved on 2009-03-22. 
  10. ^ Elisabeth Bumiller (1998-06-17). "Public Lives: An Overshadowed Altruist Sees the Light" (Web). New York Times (New York Times Company). http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/17/nyregion/public-lives-an-overshadowed-altruist-sees-the-light.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Retrieved on 2009-03-22. 
  11. ^ "Peter Soros and Flora Fraser" (Web). New York Times (New York Times Company). 1997-02-02. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/02/style/peter-soros-and-flora-fraser.html. Retrieved on 2009-03-22. 
  12. ^ Holocaust Encyclopedia
  13. ^ Michael Lewis, "The Speculator: What on earth is multibillionaire George Soros doing throwing wads of money around in Eastern Europe?", The New Republic, 10 January 1994. See also Kaufman, Michael T., Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, Alfred A. Knopf: 2002, p. 32-33
  14. ^ O'Brien, Timothy L (1998-12-06). "He's Seen The Enemy. It Looks Like Him.". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E3DA1E3BF935A35751C1A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2. Retrieved on 2008-07-28. 
  15. ^ a b c d e f Soros, George (2008). The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. Public Affairs, New York. ISBN 978-1-58648-683-9. 
  16. ^ Anderson, Jenny (2008-04-16). "Wall Street Winners Get Billion-Dollar Paydays". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16wall.html?ex=1366084800&en=1eee7351824a31ce&ei=5124. Retrieved on 2008-07-28. 
  17. ^ Steven Drobny, "Inside the House of Money", John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, 2006.
  18. ^ Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (John Wiley, 1995) ISBN 0-471-12014-6 (paperback; Wiley, 1995; ISBN 0-371-11977-6)
  19. ^ a b "Soros, the Man Who Cries Wolf, Now Is Warning of a 'Superbubble'" by Greg Ip, B1, June 21-22, 2008 The Wall Street Journal.
  20. ^ « George Soros said the world financial system has "disintegrated" », peoplestar.co.uk, Retrieved on 2009-02-24.
  21. ^ a b David Brancaccio interviews George Soros, Now, PBS, September 12, 2003, accessed Feb. 8, 2007.
  22. ^ Insider trading conviction of Soros is upheld (International Herald Tribune)
  23. ^ Soros appeals conviction for insider trading, Billionaire takes French conviction to European court (International Herald Tribune)December 14, 2006
  24. ^ Soros's Nats Bid Irks Republicans
  25. ^ [1]
  26. ^ TIME 100, The Power Givers, George Soros, TIME Magazine, May 14, 2007 accessed May 21, 2007
  27. ^ York, Byron, Soros Funded Stewart Defense, National Review Online, accessed February 7, 2007
  28. ^ Philanthropist Gives $50 Million to Help Aid the Poor in Africa
  29. ^ Laura Blumenfeld, Deep Pockets vs. Bush, Financier Contributes $5 Million More in Effort to Oust President, Washington Post, November 11, 2003; Page A03
  30. ^ Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush
  31. ^ Cheney Drops the Ball
  32. ^ "New Alliance Of Democrats Spreads Funding". http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/16/AR2006071600882_pf.html. Retrieved on 2006-07-17. 
  33. ^ Clark, Neil. "Soros Profile". the New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/200306020019. Retrieved on 2007-06-06. 
  34. ^ [2]
  35. ^ [3]
  36. ^ Salomé Zourabichvili, Herodote (magazine of the French Institute for Geopolitics, April, 2008
  37. ^ Fred Weir: Democracy rising in ex-Soviet states, Christian Science Monitor, February 10, 2005
  38. ^ [4]
  39. ^ [5]
  40. ^ Soros donates $100 million to Europe, UNIAN (June 19, 2009)
  41. ^ LeBlanc, Steve, Soros behind Mass. effort to decriminalize pot, Associated Press, August 27, 2008
  42. ^ http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=4416, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
  43. ^ Project on Death in America
  44. ^ [6]
  45. ^ [7]
  46. ^ [8]
  47. ^ Steve Kroft: Are you a religious man? Soros: No. Kroft: Do you believe in God? Soros: No. 60 Minutes, broadcast December 20, 1998.
  48. ^ chapter 10 "The Developmental States of East Asia." Hoogvelt, Ankie. 2001. in Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development. Balimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press.
  49. ^ Maggie Farley: Malaysian Leader, Soros Trade Barbs, Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1997
  50. ^ Bill Moyers Journal, George Soros on the financial crisis, published October 10, 2008, at http://odeo.com, full transcript and podcast
  51. ^ jta.org
  52. ^ Soros, George. "On Israel, America and AIPAC." New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007.

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