Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Cui Bono?

Well, George Soros, for one.

As you might expect, the current economic crisis has been no hardship for Mr. Soros. In fact, the financial wizard has made a tidy profit from it — $4 billion, to be precise.

According to The Daily Mail:

‘I’m Having a Very Good Crisis, ‘ Says Soros as Hedge Fund Managers Make Billions Off Recession

A hedge fund manager who predicted the global credit crunch has said the financial crisis has been ‘stimulating’ and the culmination of his life’s work.

George Soros, who predicted the global financial crisis twice before, was one of the few people to anticipate and prepare for the current economic collapse.

Mr Soros said his prediction meant he was better able to brace his Quantum investment fund against the global storm.

But other investors failed to take notice of his prediction and his decision to come out of retirement in 2007 to manage the fund made him $US2.9 billion.

And while the financial crisis continued to deepen across the globe, the 78-year-old still managed to make $1.1 billion last year.

‘It is, in a way, the culminating point of my life’s work,’ he told national newspaper The Australian.

Soros is one of 25, top hedge fund managers from across Wall Street who have defied the credit crunch crisis to reap a total of $11.6billion (£7.9bn) last year.
- - - - - - - - -
[…]

The managers made the profit in a year when losses were recorded at two of every three hedge funds and when hedge funds lost an average of 18 percent, according to the New York Times.

I presume that Mr. Soros and his colleagues — along with the Central Committee of the People’s Republic of China — will know exactly when the time has come to sell dollars and buy gold.

That will happen very suddenly, and it will trigger the run on the dollar, which will ignite the great inflation.

Wherever George Soros chooses to hole up after that, I’m sure he’ll be comfortable and well-protected.

The rest of us will just have to cope as best we can.


Hat tip: Gaia.

5 comments:

X said...

This is exactly what he did to the pound in the early 90s. The b-...anking magnate made his fortune when the pound crashed out of ERM, and significantly increased the depth of the crash. Oh he played by the rules for sure, everything he did was legal, but still immoral.

Henrik R Clausen said...

Yes, Soros walking away with a billion Pound Sterling was perfectly legal.

The core problem was not Soros anyway. The core problem was that this system, the ERM, was designed to protect against 'speculation and undue' gain. Soros simply proved it dysfunctional.

peterike said...

I suppose it is fairly easy to benefit from a crisis when you know what's going to happen next. That is, when you're giving orders to the stooge that masquerades as President of the U.S.

Dan said...

It’s easy to make money if you assume that Washington is driving the markets; and doing it for their own selfish ends that are at odds with the interest of the general public.

Brian Barker said...

Did you know that George Soros would not be a billionaire, if it were not for the international language Esperanto?

The Forbes Rich List places Soros as the 28th most wealthy person in the World.

Born in Hungary in 1930 as Gyorgy Schwartz, the family changed its name in 1936 to Soros, which in Esperanto means "to soar" . The Soros name change was an effort to protect the Jewish family from the rise of fascist rulers and the whole family spoke Esperanto at home.
As a native Esperanto speaker, (someone who has spoken Esperanto from birth), George Soros defected to the West in 1946, while attending an Esperanto youth meeting in Berne, Switzerland.
Esperanto enabled Soros both to defect, and to become a billionaire.