George Soros (born August 12, 1930, as Schwartz György) is a Hungarian American business magnate, philanthropist and investor. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management. He is known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" because of his US$1 billion in investment profits during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.
After surviving the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary in the early 1940s, Soros fled then-Communist-dominated Hungary in 1947 and made his way to England. There, at the London School of Economics, Soros began studying Karl Popper’sThe Open Society and Its Enemies, which explores the philosophy of science and serves as Popper’s critique of totalitarianism. The essential lesson the book imparted to Soros was that no ideology owns the truth, and that societies can flourish only when they operate freely and openly and maintain respect for individual rights—thoughts that would deeply influence Soros for the rest of his life.
In 1956, Soros moved to New York City where he worked as an arbitrage trader for F. M. Mayer (1956–59) and as an analyst for Wertheim & Co. (1959–63). Later, while working as a financial analyst and trader in New York, Soros adapted Popper’s thinking in developing his own application of the social theory of “reflexivity,” a set of ideas that seeks to explain how a feedback mechanism can skew how participants in a market value assets on that market. After concluding that he had more talent for trading than for philosophy, Soros began to apply his ideas on reflexivity to investing, using it to predict, among other things, the emergence of financial bubbles. In 1967, he helped establish an offshore investment fund. In 1973, he set up a private investment firm that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund, one of the first hedge funds.
The most of people know him during the great depression of 1992. He speculated on sterling’s fall, and he caused important fluctuations such as the British currency was forced out of the monetary system. This bet allowed him to earn a billion in one night and he was called as “the man who broken the Bank of England”.
Soros is a well-known supporter of progressive-liberal political causes. Between 1979 and 2011, Soros gave away over $8 billion to causes related to human rights, public health, and education. He played a significant role in the peaceful transition from communism to capitalism in Hungary (1984–89) and provided one of Europe's largest higher education endowments to Central European University of Budapest. Soros is also the chairman of the Open Society Foundations.
0 comments:
Post a Comment