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Politics : Bush-The Mastermind behind 9/11? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Earl who wrote (1836)	8/8/2003 10:42:05 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 20039

Hi Don, Re: Were his corporate raider days really good deals for everyone except for a few shareholders eating sour grapes? Or did Soros get religion and is trying to buy his way into heaven to make up for past dirty deeds? I've followed George Soros career with some interest for quite a while. As far as his money making days, he has great notoriety as a currency trader, and is described as "the man who broke the Bank of England" in 1992 when the UK fell out of the currency bands established in the ERM, the so-called Exchange Rate Mechanism, which was a device being employed at the time to harmonize the various currencies that eventually were replaced by the Euro. Apparently, Soros' Quantum Fund grossed about $1 Billion on the speculation. Soros had great success throughout the 1990's as he made good on various other currency speculations and stock investments. By the late 1990's, he had transitioned out of active management of the Quantum Fund, relying on the trading moxie of Stanley Druckenmiller for day to day operations. The Quantum Fund suffered a couple of disasterous years in 2000 and 2001 due to the heavy exposure to high tech stocks. I believe that the Quantum Fund has either been rolled up, or is a mere shell of its former self at this time. Druckenmiller has moved on to other opportunities. During the 1990's Soros indulged his philanthropic side, based on his accrued assets and the philosophy of Karl Popper. See: wikipedia.org Soros spent a lot of money on creating democratic "civil society" institutions in the former Soviet Union from the mid-1990's forward. His new focus on U.S. civil society is something I welcome. Today, the U.S. seems be at least as broken a society as the FSU nations, at least to an observer like me. Soros has been associated with the Clintons, the DLC and moderately progressive campaigns for many years. What he announced today with ACT is merely a continuation of his interests from the past. You are correct in observing what appears to be a split personality in Soros. His prescient market calls made him one of the richest men in the world, and he played the game ruthlessly, just as every successful capitalist always has. The wonderful thing about Soros is that making money hasn't been the ultimate and shallow goal of his existence. His interest in civil society is genuine. If there is one minor complaint that I have about Soros, it is a quibble about his turgid writing style. I've attempted to read "The Alchemy of Finance" and found that it was a perfect cure for insomnia.

To: Don Earl who wrote (1836)	8/9/2003 12:41:07 AM
From: MSI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20039

As Ray points out the key to Soros is his early studies under Karl Popper, whose 'Open Society' was a major book opposing the rising tide of fascism when it came out. Soros says it changed his life. His aggressive market trading style has been financial engineering primarily with national currencies, not a battle with small shareholder victims. An interesting note on all that: amsterdam.nettime.org "Young George Soros arrived in London aged 18, with no money and no friends. He worked as a waiter, a house painter, and an agricultural labourer, before enrolling as a student at the London School of Economics in 1949. But Soros wasn't really interested in economics. Instead, he chose to study philosophy, and came under the influence of Karl Popper. It was Popper who taught Soros about the notion of the open society, which Soros later said was the thing he cared most about in his life. Ralf Dahrendorf knew both Popper and Soros. Ralf Dahrendorf: Popper had just arrived on the scene; the book, 'The Open Society and its Enemies' had just been published, and was actually one of the major texts of the times. I am not sure that Soros then saw himself as a philosopher; he did not in fact take his LSE studies unduly seriously at the time, but he was struck by this one idea about one can move out of the nightmares of totalitarianism of both descriptions, into a world which is more open, more experimental, in which you try, make mistakes, correct them - a whole set of ideas and attitudes which were obviously attractive to this young man who had had indirectly at least, two totalitarian experiences. Tom Morton: What exactly did Popper mean by the open society? Ralf Dahrendorf: He's never defined it properly. It was always - if you want to put it that way, a negative term - the absence of ideologies which are all-inclusive, the absence of a State which dominates everything. The whole point about the open society is that it doesn't seek a system and doesn't want a system. And so it wants institutions which make change without violence possible. MUSIC Tom Morton: After leaving the London School of Economics, George Soros worked for a couple of stockbroking firms before moving to New York in 1956. There he worked for an American broking firm trading European stocks, which no-one else knew anything about. Soros was moderately successful, but it wasn't until nearly 20 years later that he began to make really big money. Robert Slater: He set up a hedge fund, called the Quantum Fund, and he used a couple of hundred thousand dollars of his own money, and the rest is history, so to speak. I mean that fund has gone on to become the most successful investment venture in the history of the financial markets. Tom Morton: As an investor, Soros was ahead of his time. The fund he set up was a hedge fund - one which gives other investors a way of hedging their bets against future movements in prices of exchange rates. Well nowadays, hedge funds are all the rage, but back in 1973 when Soros set up his Quantum Fund, they were virtually unknown. Soros went into partnership with Jim Rogers, a young American trader who had also studied philosophy. They rented offices on Central Park, a long way away from the hype and hubbub of Wall street and the trading floors. But Soros and Rogers set out deliberately to distance themselves from the Wall Street traders, whom they referred to as 'the herd'. Robert Slater: Well they thought that these people on Wall Street didn't really understand the market. That's the big difference; they thought these people were just taking their economics courses and believing that the market was this rational animal, that all you had to do was factor in the fundamentals of any company and make some computations about future earnings, projections, and you could more or less hopefully come up with some prediction about what a certain stock would do, or wouldn't do. Soros thought that was rubbish. He believed that a lot of the way a stock moves or doesn't move has to do with people's perceptions, and it doesn't really have to do with the fundamentals of the company that's behind the stock. And that in order to succeed at stock picking, you had to really almost be a psychologist. And you had to understand the way 'the herd' was moving at any particular time, and when it was going to move, and at what pace, and you should base your own judgements about stock picking on the herd mentality and watching it, rather than basing yourself only on how companies were doing.