Who is . . . George Soros?
Larry Elliott
It’s 7.45pm on the evening of September 16 1992. Night is falling and the chancellor of the exchequer, an ashen-faced Norman Lamont, nervously runs his hands through his hair as the flashbulbs pop.
After a day of disaster in which the Bank of England’s foreign currency reserves have been cleaned out in defence of the pound, Lamont has been sent out to admit the terrible truth: Britain has been humbled by the financial speculators.
Black Wednesday made George Soros. His attack on sterling catapulted him into the public eye as “the man who broke the Bank of England”. This was mostly hype, of course, for every other bank and investment fund had easy pickings once it was clear that the Conservatives were trying to defend the indefensible: sterling’s exchange rate against the mark at a time of grinding recession. It was like taking candy off a baby. But Soros placed the biggest bets. He took the most candy.
Six years on, Soros has attained God- like status. When he turns up at the World Economic Forum in Davos he is mobbed by reporters waiting to transmit his latest words of wisdom to the markets.
Soros knows how to pick his moments. This week, a letter sent to the Financial Times about the economic chaos in Russia was a front-page splash. Attempts by the Yeltsin administration, the arch-speculator said, were in vain. The sensible course of action was to devalue the rouble by up to 25% and set up a currency board so that the Russian currency could be pegged against the dollar, and for the new system to be backed by $50-billion of loans and credit from the West.
As soon as the letter hit the markets, all hell broke loose. The Russian stock market fell by 15% as the authorities tried to contain the devaluation speculation. Crisis talks were held with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This was all front-page news.
Buried away in the back of a later issue of the Financial Times was a paragraph stating that the dollar had moved up by more than 2,5 pfennigs against the Deutsche mark from DM1,7747 to DM1,8003.
“The `Soros shop’,” said the Financial Times, “then sold huge quantities of dollars against the German mark – $2- billion according to some estimates – at upwards of DM1,7930. The dollar duly dropped, reaching DM1,7820 in late-morning trading in Europe”.
In other words, Soros made a killing. He would have known that his comments would weaken the mark – because what is seen as bad for Russia is seen as bad for Germany – and sold at the top of the market.
His profit margin on the trade may not have been that big, but when you’re talking about $2-billion punts, the profit margin does not have to be that big. Even if Soros made only 1%, he would have netted $20-million.
Soros is not one of Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe, but a self- made man who thinks unconventional thoughts and gives away much of his money through his charitable foundations. He is one-third hard- nosed financier, one-third philosopher-king, one-third latter-day Robin Hood.
Born in Budapest in 1930, Soros had first-hand experience of both Nazism and Soviet-style communism before emigrating to Britain at the age of 17. He studied at the London School of Economics, where he fell under the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper.
He started as a salesman for a fancy goods manufacturer, making novelties, souvenirs and costume jewellery. “It was not easy to get a job when I got out of college because I was a foreigner without connections. I became a travelling salesman in Welsh seaside resorts, and this was a low point in my career.”
Eventually in 1953 he found a job with the London firm Singer & Friedlander, helped by the fact that the managing director was a fellow Hungarian. He was not an overnight success in the stuffy world of merchant banking in the 1950s, and eventually moved to Wall Street before setting up his Quantum Fund, a private mutual fund registered in Curaao in the Lesser Antilles, in 1969.
Quantum’s arrival coincided with the profound changes to the global financial system, ushered in by the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange-rate system in the early 1970s, the arrival in power of right- wing governments dedicated to the deregulation of financial markets, and technological changes that facilitated the instant transmission of funds around the globe. All constraints were taken off global markets and big money was to be made.
Soros has certainly made big money, but he is not infallible. He lost $800-million at the time of the 1987 stock market crash. But Black Wednesday and the attack on what was left of the Exchange Rate Mechanism the following year were real coups.
As he became richer, he became more powerful, with his prophecies becoming self-fulfilling because of the funds and the reputation he was able to put behind them.
So is Soros as good as people think he is? Almost certainly not. It’s not difficult to move markets when you back your bet with $2-billion, and you didn’t have to be John Maynard Keynes in September 1992 to see that sterling was a one-way bet. The way in which Soros can manipulate markets and ride roughshod over governments is starting to be seen as worrying, not least by Soros himself.
Last year, he wrote an article for the American Atlantic Monthly magazine, condemning modern capitalism, and drawing heavily on Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. For some, this was the biggest conversion since St Paul decided he was heading the wrong way on the road to Damascus.
“Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is a belief in the magic of the marketplace. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest … our present system – which, however imperfect, qualifies as an open society – is liable to break down.”
These words started to look remarkably prescient later that year, as financial contagion spread across Asia. Economies hailed as “tigers” months before, were humbled by speculators, including the Quantum Fund.
At the annual meeting of the World Bank and IMF in Hong Kong, Soros clashed with the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who called currency speculation “unnecessary, unproductive and immoral”.
Yet Soros has always been something of an enigma. He sees nothing to be ashamed of in what he does, yet is uneasy about the system under which speculation is rife. He has his own form of global redistribution, recycling the money he has made into the rebuilding of the post-communist economies of the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. Where most fund managers cloak themselves in secrecy, he has spoken out.
To some, this is his strangest aspect. Fund managers are not supposed to write letters to the Financial Times. But Soros has hit upon one of the truths of the new global marketplace: the thing that dealers fear more than anything else is being behind the curve. They crave leadership: Soros provides it.