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George Soros

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George Soros (born August 12, 1930) is the son of the Esperanto writer Tivadar Soros. In 1946, George Soros escaped Hungary for the West by participating in an Esperanto youth congress. His is famous as a currency speculator and a philanthropist.

Soros emigrated to England in 1947 and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952. In 1956, he moved to the United States. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute.

Soros became instantly famous on September 22, 1992, when, believing the British pound was overvalued, he speculated heavily against it. The Bank of England was forced to withdraw the currency out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and Soros earned an estimated US$1 billion in the process. He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England." In 1997, under similar circumstances, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad accused Soros of bringing down the Malaysian currency, the ringgit.

Despite his carefully groomed media image, Soros is a controversial figure because on the one hand, as an international investor and currency speculator, he has become extremely wealthy (his fortune in 2000 was estimated at US$ five billion). On the other, he freely acknowledges that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries.

Critics point out that Soros plays the currency markets through Quantum Fund, his privately-owned investment fund registered in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, a Caribbean tax haven which has repeatedly been cited by the International Task Force on Money Laundering of the OECD as one of the world's most important centers for laundering the illegal proceeds of the Latin American drug trade. By operating from Curaçao, Soros avoids paying taxes, and also hides the nature of his investors, and what he does with their money.

Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa.

He received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York), the University of Oxford in 1980, the Budapest University of Economics, and Yale University in 1991.

Soros is married with five children.

Published Works

  • The Alchemy of Finance (1987)
  • Opening the Soviet System (1990)
  • Underwriting Democracy (1991)
  • Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995)
  • The Crisis of Global Capitalism" (1998)
  • Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000)
  • George Soros on Globalization (PublicAffairs, March 2002)

External Links and references