Davos Stars: George Soros – The Man Who Broke the Bank of England

George Sorosby Felicity Duncan

Eighty-four-year-old George Soros, a graduate of the London School of Economics, is a man who has achieved many things. However, he may be remembered most as the man who brought the British pound to its knees in 1992, during the Black Wednesday UK currency crisis. Soros famously shorted the pound, calling the bluff of the Bank of England, and pocketing a billion pounds.

Beyond his currency shenanigans, however, Hungarian-born George Soros is a well-known and generous philanthropist. He has given billions to various human rights causes, and his Soros Foundation has played a key role in advocating for democracy and economic freedom in the formerly Soviet states of Eastern Europe. Having survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary, and fled Communist rule in Hungary in 1947, Soros is particularly passionate about helping the nations of the former Soviet Union transition to democracy and capitalism.

In addition, he has supported education, poverty-reduction, and drug policy reform projects around the world, and he founded the well-known Central European University in Budapest with an endowment of $880m.

Soros has long been a passionate friend of South Africa. In the 1970s, Soros provided funds to help black students attend university in apartheid South Africa, and in 1993 as South Africa moved towards democracy, he established the Open Society Foundation for South Africa, which promotes a society in which the rule of law and divergent opinions are respected.

Soros, who lives in America with his third wife, forty-three-year-old Tamiko Bolton, has been a prominent participant at the World Economic Forum for many years. Despite his vocation as a hedge fund manager, Soros is a sharp critic of the current system of financial speculation. He argues that such trading and speculating does not create true economic value and undermines economic activity in some places.

In conjunction with BrightRock, we have taken to sharing the stories from our recently published World Economic Forum starter pack PDF, ‘A Veterans Guide to Surviving Davos’ with you – Follow the link to download the full document

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