George Soros

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George Soros

George Soros (b. 12 August 1930 in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary), born Gyรถrgy Schwartz, is a Jewish billionaire born in Hungary, later becoming a citizen of the United States.

Various forms of criticisms have been directed at the sources of his wealth such as financial speculation. He has been argued to have financed various controversial political activists in various countries such as color revolutions, gun control, leftist protest groups, and leftist political parties and candidates.

A 2016 hack of George Sorosโ€™s Open Society Foundations have revealed extensive lobbying and funding of politically correct organizations and issues such as Black Lives Matter and mass immigration. See the "External links" section.

The Open Society Foundations has also been active in transporting Africans to Europe. See White demographics.

Life

Family

George Soros is the son of the writer Teodoro Schwartz. Teodoro (also known as Tivadar) 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.[1]

The family changed its name in 1936 from Schwartz to Soros. Tivadar wrote of his ordeal to survive in Fascist Hungary, and help people escape it, in his book Maskerado.

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 and Gregory (with his second wife, Susan). His older brother is Paul Soros.

Hungary during the War

Soros was thirteen years old when Germany took military control over its wavering ally Hungary (21 March 1944), and began thorough anti-communist initiatves. Soros worked briefly for the Jewish Council, which had been established by the Germans, to deliver messages to Jewish lawyers being called for deportation. Soros was not aware of the consequence of the messages.[2] His communist father had Soros spend the summer of 1944 living with a non-Jewish Ministry of Agriculture employee, posing as his godson.

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

In 1946, Soros escaped the Soviet occupation by participating in an Esperanto youth congress in the West. Soros was taught to speak the language from birth and thus is one of the rare native Esperanto speakers.

Soros emigrated to the United Kingdom 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. He eventually secured an entry-level position with London merchant bank Singer & Friedlander.

Move to the United States

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.

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. 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. After all those years, his net worth reached an estimated $11 billion. He is also a former member of the Carlyle investment group.

Collapsing national currencies

On Black Wednesday (16 September 1992), Soros became immediately famous when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, profiting from the Bank of England's reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency.

Finally, the Bank of England was forced to withdraw the currency out of 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 26 October 1992, Monday 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."

Open Society Foundations

Soros supports progressive and liberal political causes, to which he dispenses donations through the Open Society Foundations (OSF). OSF was founded by Soros in 1993 as the Open Society Institute (OSI). According to the organization OpenSecrets, the OSF spends much of its resources on democratic causes around the world, and has also contributed to groups such as the Tides Foundation.[3] The OSF has been a major financial supporter of U.S. immigration reform, including establishing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.[4]

In 2023, George Soros handed over the leadership of the Foundation to his son Alexander Soros.

External links

2016 hack

Article archives

References

  1. โ†‘ Kaufman, Michael T., Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, Alfred A. Knopf: 2002
  2. โ†‘ Kaufman, Michael T., Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, Alfred A. Knopf: 2002, p. 32-33
  3. โ†‘ broken cite news
  4. โ†‘ broken cite news


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