just for clarity i dont own a scaffold---or a gun--the mythical petron cans are still in the actual shed---i have no idea where St George is or want to.
Great news about the FT Person of the Year award. I’ve mentioned it before on here but if anyone is truly interested in why George Soros is motivated to do what he does try reading ‘Maskerado (Dancing around Death in Nazi Hungary)’ by his father Tivadar Soros.
People like Trump and Orban aren’t fit to clean his shoes.
Declaration of interest: I'm one of those shady recipients of Soros's shady support for shady NGOs. Amount: €1500.
People who make shed loads of money will usually have done things which a lot of people will consider in some ways undesirable, possibly immoral. Nevertheless we do business with them. We buy their software, we hold their shares in our pension funds (some of you may be surprised to learn that you are 'invested' in Big Tobacco.)
George Soros is one of those who has decided that he should use a lot of his gains (ill-gotten as you see fit) to as he sees it "put something back". Bill Gates is another. There are many hedge fund managers, who are not. Also, while I may live to regret saying this, I am fairly sure that Soros' personal wealth does not derive in any significant way from tax dodging. Zuckerberg and the Google guys have tax avoidance at the heart of their business model and then go round the world telling countries that they should change their tax regimes, and then they might consider paying tax. Soros wealth derives from a time before tax avoidance became a core business strategy.
He set up the Central European University because he saw that the unis in the post communist -countries were not fit for modern purpose. I have lost count of the number of Czech students who have confirmed exactly that to me. He opened it in Budapest as a gesture towards the country he loved, and until Orban came along, most people in Hungary saw no negatives to it.
I was really quite surprised to learn of Soros' views on what society looks like. Again, it is the polar opposite of what you hear from the average hedge fund tycoon. As far as I am concerned, the Open Society Fund supports things that make societies better. One (of very many) is support for Freedom of Information campaigners. That's where I got to learn about OSF. When we wanted to copy the brilliant WhatDoTheyKnow website in the Czech Republic, we found that the local OSF was already involved in supporting the local FOI expert (he had helped to write the law), so we applied to them for a grant to cover build costs of the website. Since then we have funded it ourselves. It's a volunteer thing. This completely wrongfoots local goons who think we are part of a Soros "network" which pays people salaries to "remake society" in his ideal.
If someone could find me evidence of things which Soros supports that are somehow "bad", I'd be interested to read of them. If you want any examples of what Orban supports which are bad, I can rattle them off in a heartbeat.
To be fair if Soros hadn't have broken the Bank of England in 1992 then someone else would have done - it was the speculative equivalent of an open goal. Would the population have preferred the economic misery which would have resulted from persisting with the wrong exchange rate?
Sure but every other country in the ERM simply devalued against the DM that weekend. They went on to stay in the ERM, form the Euro and most enjoyed growth throughout save 2-3 years post crash.
The trouble with the UK is that the value of sterling is kinda attached to the flag for cultural reasons too obscure to discuss.
George Soros has been named as the FT's Man of the Year. I will admit I don't know much about him, other than the fact that he escaped Nazism, left Hungary to live, study and work in London, made a great deal of money with successive hedge funds, successfully backed against sterling during the ERM crisis, is an extremely generous philanthropist, has given billions of dollars to various liberal organisations through his Open Society Foundation, I had to pretend to be him in a commercial property auction in around 1990 and (this is the bit that makes me think that, in general terms, he's probably a good egg) Nigel Farage hates him.
So, what does the pool of unlimited Charlton Life knowledge make of George Soros? The "biggest danger to the entire western world"? Or Man of the Year?
Ummmmmmm, I feel like you buried the lede here mate.
I was involved on the very fringes of the commercial property auction market in the late 80s and early 90s a.
If that's you in your picture would not have had you down as old enough to be doing that in the 80s!
To be fair if Soros hadn't have broken the Bank of England in 1992 then someone else would have done - it was the speculative equivalent of an open goal. Would the population have preferred the economic misery which would have resulted from persisting with the wrong exchange rate?
Sure but every other country in the ERM simply devalued against the DM that weekend. They went on to stay in the ERM, form the Euro and most enjoyed growth throughout save 2-3 years post crash.
The trouble with the UK is that the value of sterling is kinda attached to the flag for cultural reasons too obscure to discuss.
If the UK had bitten the bullet and devalued then Soros would still have made his profit, but the BoE wouldn’t have lost money by buying up GBP in a flawed attempt to arrest the inevitable.
Central banking is all about ‘credibility’ and Soros correctly postulated that the UK’s defence of the exchange rate wasn’t credible, because no sane country would tolerate the economic pain it would have implied.
Comments
People like Trump and Orban aren’t fit to clean his shoes.
Amount: €1500.
People who make shed loads of money will usually have done things which a lot of people will consider in some ways undesirable, possibly immoral. Nevertheless we do business with them. We buy their software, we hold their shares in our pension funds (some of you may be surprised to learn that you are 'invested' in Big Tobacco.)
George Soros is one of those who has decided that he should use a lot of his gains (ill-gotten as you see fit) to as he sees it "put something back". Bill Gates is another. There are many hedge fund managers, who are not. Also, while I may live to regret saying this, I am fairly sure that Soros' personal wealth does not derive in any significant way from tax dodging. Zuckerberg and the Google guys have tax avoidance at the heart of their business model and then go round the world telling countries that they should change their tax regimes, and then they might consider paying tax. Soros wealth derives from a time before tax avoidance became a core business strategy.
He set up the Central European University because he saw that the unis in the post communist -countries were not fit for modern purpose. I have lost count of the number of Czech students who have confirmed exactly that to me. He opened it in Budapest as a gesture towards the country he loved, and until Orban came along, most people in Hungary saw no negatives to it.
I was really quite surprised to learn of Soros' views on what society looks like. Again, it is the polar opposite of what you hear from the average hedge fund tycoon. As far as I am concerned, the Open Society Fund supports things that make societies better. One (of very many) is support for Freedom of Information campaigners. That's where I got to learn about OSF. When we wanted to copy the brilliant WhatDoTheyKnow website in the Czech Republic, we found that the local OSF was already involved in supporting the local FOI expert (he had helped to write the law), so we applied to them for a grant to cover build costs of the website. Since then we have funded it ourselves. It's a volunteer thing. This completely wrongfoots local goons who think we are part of a Soros "network" which pays people salaries to "remake society" in his ideal.
If someone could find me evidence of things which Soros supports that are somehow "bad", I'd be interested to read of them. If you want any examples of what Orban supports which are bad, I can rattle them off in a heartbeat.
The trouble with the UK is that the value of sterling is kinda attached to the flag for cultural reasons too obscure to discuss.
Central banking is all about ‘credibility’ and Soros correctly postulated that the UK’s defence of the exchange rate wasn’t credible, because no sane country would tolerate the economic pain it would have implied.