Soros in September
On September 13, Donald Trump shared with NBC News his opinion on George Soros. “He’s a bad guy,” the president averred. “Should be put in jail.” In fact, Trump has made his dim view of Soros known many times before. Just in August, he opined on social media that Soros and his son and philanthropic heir Alexander “should be charged with RICO because of their support for Violent Protests and much more.”
We can parenthesize that Trump is referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act of 1970; as for his style of capitalization, Trump is on his own. (And for the record, Soros and Soros stoutly deny that they support violence.)
Anyone reading TAC, of course, or generally familiar with the news over the last couple of decades, knows about Soros, the free-spending billionaire, including his emergence as a figure of fear and infamy to the conservative half of the world.
So maybe we shouldn’t let September 16 go by (or not go too far by) without a nod to the events that first brought the man to prominence. Soros started his hedge fund in 1973 and, by making a lot of money over the next two decades, made a name for himself in financial circles.
However, he didn’t become widely known to the public until 1992, when he “shorted” (bet against) the British pound and won big, to the tune of a billion dollars. He had help, we might add, from a young Scott Bessent, now, of course, Trump’s treasury secretary.
Soros made his big capital gain on September 16, 1992. Yet interestingly, “Black Wednesday” was little known in the U.S. at the time. The newspaper of record, The New York Times, didn’t take note for more than a month; on October 27, 1992, under the headline, “Big Winner From Plunge In Sterling.” The item was just a brief 156-word wire story which began, “The Hungarian-American financier George Soros made a profit of almost $1 billion during last month’s devaluation of the British pound by betting heavily that the currency would collapse despite Government assurances to the contrary.”
So 33 years ago, Americans and the world were introduced to the new realm of currency speculation. Back then, total international foreign exchange trading totaled a trillion a year, having doubled over the previous five years, as the Berlin Wall came down and China began opening up.
Given that the major media lean left, one might have expected that Soros, the international speculator and profiteer, would have been castigated by the chattering class as what Teddy Roosevelt would have called a “malefactor of great wealth,” or what Franklin D. Roosevelt would have dubbed a “moneychanger in the temple.”
Yet by the 1990s, the old leftism had become the new thing called neoliberalism. This nouveau gauche was perfectly comfortable with capitalism, so long as it was progressive on environmental and cultural matters. Thus Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were forever disdained. In the eyes of elites in London and New York, those two supply-siders were bumptiously bourgeois and ridiculously right-wing, even as their more prole supporters were dismissed as deplorables.
Two decades after Soros’s success, the lefties at the Guardian savored the moment. Its headline, “Black Wednesday, 20 years on: a bad day for the Tories but not for Britain: The momentous day gave Blair’s Labour biggest ever victory and liberated the UK economy.” The article trilled, “British politics was turned on its head as a result of the humiliation of John Major’s government.” Major was, of course, the conservative successor to Thatcher—defeated in 1997 by Labour leader Tony Blair.
During these years, Soros played the chatterers like a harp. Taking time away from hedging, Soros started writing. He began in 1984, with, of course, a denunciation of Reaganomics. In the years and decades that followed, he cranked out hundreds of essays, many of them appearing in the Financial Times, the New York Times, or the eggheadier New York Review of Books. He wrote tomes, too, advancing his “general theory of reflexivity,” that being his homage to John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. (Which was, in turn, imitative of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.)
By 1994, the Times could report, “Mr. Soros’s opinions have been so respected that his public predictions about currency movements have become self-fulfilling in several instances, even though he devotes most of his time to running his charitable foundation.” Indeed, in addition to his writings, Soros had launched the Open Society Foundation, which he has endowed with tens of billions.
The following year, 1995, the financial writer George J.W. Goodman could declare himself thoroughly charmed by this man: “I had him as a guest on my PBS show . . . He was ironic, detached, charming, self-deprecating, and he sounded like Claude Rains in ‘Casablanca.’” Soros’s true mission, Goodman concluded: “A fervent attempt to get across a philosophical viewpoint.” What intellectual, or close enough, could not love that? Lest anyone miss the point about Soros’s philosopher-king-ness, Goodman quoted him further: “My life is not about money. Money is a means to an end.” Okay-y-y.
In 1996, Robert Slater published Soros: The Life, Times & Trading Secrets of the World’s Most Influential Investor, which is so inside Soros that it seems to have been at least semi-authorized. Here’s the author’s take on his subject in the 1950s, when Soros was a student at the London School of Economics:
He could easily imagine himself remaining at LSE and becoming an academic, perhaps a philosopher like Karl Popper. How wonderful it would be if he could stretch his mind as Popper had, and above all else present the world with some major insight, “like Freud or Einstein.” On other occasions, he dreamed of becoming a new John Maynard Keynes, of scaling the same heights as an economic thinker as the world-famous British economist.
Try as he might, Soros has never ranked that high on intellectual influence. Yet his financial influence bought him beaucoup goodwill from, for example, the BBC: “He’s used his fortune to fund thousands of education, health, human rights and democracy projects.”
Indeed, Soros became a foil to Trump: the cultured good thinker, not the short-fingered vulgarian. So for a while, the media—by now the “mainstream media” or MSM—could feel comfortable juxtaposing the two men. Hence the New Yorker as recently as 2018: “How George Soros Upstaged Donald Trump at Davos.”
But where are they now? Trump, of course, is back in the White House, itching for payback. For his part, George Soros is now in his mid-90s, retired from public life. As for Alex Soros, a mere 39, he doesn’t seem to have any interest in finance, and yet he’s certainly well wired, by both heritage and marriage.
With that September 16 anniversary on our mind, we might wonder if some big financial play—including perhaps, some sort of neoliberal ambush—could one day turn another conservative government on its head.
To be sure, that’s all, er, speculation, and yet there’s one thing we do know: The foreign exchange market, which churned less than a trillion dollars in 1992, is now larger by orders of magnitude, running trillions of dollars in transactions daily. With that much volume—and the x-factors of crypto, AI, and quantum computing—who knows what could happen.
So step carefully, Uncle Sam. This September, it’s a good thing that Scott Bessent, the ex-Soros man, is on your side.