41–50 of 277 posts
It makes me wonder if he would have been successful if he wasn't able to short 10 billion. As the article said, Norman Lamont was planning to defend the sterling with 15 billion.
The "Soros broke the bank" framing I tend to see in discussions of this is really quite odd, as if it were some sort of illegal Oceans 11 style heist. He didn't break the bank. The bank broke itself. > What kept the pound from plummeting in value was the British government’s guarantee that it would keep the value propped up, and the market believed that it would. As long as everyone believed that England would stay i…
> If you build a house on rotten stilts, and some neighborhood kid comes and kicks one of them, it's not the kid's fault when the house collapses. It's at least partially the kid's fault. Don't go kicking stilts under houses.
It's interesting to read this with an eye on current global macroeconomic conditions. The dollar is significantly overvalued today, a result of its status as the global reserve currency. And the consequences of that are all the same ones mentioned for the pound in the article. The U.S. has been running a large current account deficit since 1980: we import more than we export. Our jobs are moving overseas, because it…
> The U.S. has stated that they're committed to defending the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What happens when they can't... What happens if they already ain't? The narrative of the us$ being the reserve currency is old, but today it is even less convincing...
It's interesting to read this with an eye on current global macroeconomic conditions. The dollar is significantly overvalued today, a result of its status as the global reserve currency. And the consequences of that are all the same ones mentioned for the pound in the article. The U.S. has been running a large current account deficit since 1980: we import more than we export. Our jobs are moving overseas, because it…
There are upsides and downsides to being a reserve currency though that other nations might not want to take on, a non nation state currency that wants/needs to inflate might be a better bet. The US built up on the good side of being a reserve currency. > The advantages of reserve currency status for the dollar are well known. The world’s willingness to accumulate dollar reserves in the post World War II period first…
It makes me wonder if he would have been successful if he wasn't able to short 10 billion. As the article said, Norman Lamont was planning to defend the sterling with 15 billion.
It wasn't just him though. By the sounds of things lots of players smelled blood in the water. Saros has 10bn, but other players probably had a lot more between them...
There seems to be an abundance of posts about Soros himself getting flagged killed in this thread. Why is that? Are his character and his political ambitions not relevant to a discussion about his demonstrated ability and intent to cause massive financial disturbance in the global economy?
it's not clear to me that this was his intent. the intent seems to be making a lot of money.
There seems to be an abundance of posts about Soros himself getting flagged killed in this thread. Why is that? Are his character and his political ambitions not relevant to a discussion about his demonstrated ability and intent to cause massive financial disturbance in the global economy?
There is a time and a place for everything. This is not the place in my and many other's opinion.
There seems to be an abundance of posts about Soros himself getting flagged killed in this thread. Why is that? Are his character and his political ambitions not relevant to a discussion about his demonstrated ability and intent to cause massive financial disturbance in the global economy?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. And if a kid pushes an old man and he breaks his hip, that's the old man's fault for getting old! Oh, wait. https://twitter.com/ceejayoz
Except that Soros did not hurt UK economy. Just bruised some egos at the Bank of England by showing their stupid mistakes.
Letting the currency float was better in the long term, and his actions made that happen, but I'd like to think there were other ways. And I doubt helping the UK was his goal; I can think of billions of other more likely reasons. Many people would say he stole this money from the government. It was legal, clever, and successful. He did some good things with some of the money afterward. Still, I'm not going to like him for it. (That sums up my feelings on much of the finance industry, in fact.)