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George Soros: Eastern Europe
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Billionaire investor George Soros, once dubbed "The Man who broke the Bank of England," said in a television interview on Tuesday he was selling dollars in currency markets, briefly adding to the greenback's woes. His comments on CNBC, which came as the dollar was plumbing four-year lows against Europe's common currency and amid widespread doubts about the U.S. commitment to its so-called strong dollar policy, pushed the euro briefly above $1.17.
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Recently, George Soros played an important role in the change of governments, especially in central and eastern Europe. He was particularly active in Poland, where he was, at the same time, friend of General Jaruselski and of the main official patron of the Solidarnoc (Solidarity) trade union, the Polish Bronislaw Geremek, who is currently member of the ICG administrative council. He was ... very active in Hungary, his native country.
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More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soros is the uncrowned king of eastern Europe. His Central European University, with campuses in Budapest, Warsaw and Prague and exchange programmes in the US, unashamedly propagates the ethos of neoliberal capitalism and clones the next pro-American generation of political leaders in the region. With his financial stranglehold over political parties, business, educational institutions and the arts, criticism of Soros in mainstream eastern European media is hard to find. Hagiography is not. The Budapest Sun reported in February how he had been made an honorary citizen of Budapest by the mayor, Gabor Demszky. "Few people have done to Budapest what George Soros has," gushed Demszky, saying that the billionaire had contributed to "structural and mental changes in the capital city and Hungary itself".
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Soros is most famous for his single-day gain of US$1 billion on Sept 6, 1992, which he madebyshort selling the British pound. At the time, England was part of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism,a fixed exchange-rate system which included other European countries. The other countries were pressuring England to devalue its currency in relation to the other countries in the system or to leave the system. England resisted the devaluation, but with continued pressure fromthe fixed system and speculatorsin the currency market,England floated its currency and the value of the poundsuffered.
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In 1979 Soros establishes the first Open Society Foundation, in the USA. The first Foundation in Eastern Europe is established in 1984 in Hungary. Presently similar Foundations are active in more than 30 countries.
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France's highest appeals court declared George Soros an insider trader today, rejecting his appeal from a 2005 conviction for violating insider trading rules in 1988. Although Soros has exhausted his options to fight the conviction in French courts, he plans to carry on the fight by appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
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