The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)

I remember listening to the news on the radio that day, the government changed the interest rate twice, from 10% to 12% at about 11am and then a couple of hours later up to 15%

Because Burry et al helped collapse it sooner and softer, and their profits came from the banks’ losses.

> that British labour was suddenly more price competitive

That seems to translate to "workers were getting paid less and their savings were devalued" to me. Am I mistaken?

It wasn’t just a horse bet by my reading of the article. It was more like they noticed that there was an opportunity to hobble a horse if you and your buddies rush the field and that the odds makers were not anticipating this so you bet otherwise.

You can marvel at the technical ingenuity of a heist like this but the ethics are dubious. The strongest counter is that the Bank of England wasn’t paying attention but that’s mildly victim claiming just like it would be if a company fell prey to a novel 0-day software exploit.

The myth is about Soros, but it was a network of largely U.S. investment banks that co-ordinated and piled on to raid the BoE. Consider that the GameStonks craze where people just really, really liked the stock got threatened with charges of market manipulation, almost took out Robinhood, with contagion exposure to Citadel with system wide risk, and caused back door intervention by Fed authorities and even the Whitehouse - Soros' payday is evidence for Balzac's adage that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. I have no doubt what he did would be absolutely criminal today.

He went on to create the Open Society Foundations, which supported and co-ordinated aspects of the (then) progressive anti-globalization movement of the 90s I was involved in. At the time the movement was mostly anti-capitalist, uniting labor and civil society against (neo-liberal) trade agreements designed to exploit the poverty and authoritarianism of other countries and to hollow out western economies by exporting manufacturing jobs, and against exploitative policies by the IMF, who used loans to indebt and subordinate elected governments and force privatization and sale of their infrastructure to transnational corps and roll back environmental protection. (see, confessions of an economic hitman, nologo, etc.) Ostensibly noble causes.

It almost seemed like a billionaire's noblesse oblige. Soros was the "good capitalist." The movements themselves failed after 9/11, and Occupy was a whimper in comparison to the battles of Seattle, Quebec City, Turin, and others. The US rust belt was exported destroyed in the 90's and 2000s, laying the ground for the populist revolt that created 2015 election result. However, his OSF foundations and network of NGOs flourished, installing progressive activists from the era in colleges and political parties, and other key institutions.

Trouble is, these weren't working class labor organizers and anarcho-anti-capitalists, they were technocrats, equipped with an ideology whose specific endgame is central economic co-ordination, and it was nominally anti-capitalist in the sense that it is against the individualistic cultural aspects of smallholders and the autonomy and values small business provides, and that it uses critical theory as a tool to dissolve the bonds of societies. This is the kernel of truth beneath the layers of hallucinatory conspiracy theory.

To me, Soros is just a visionary criminal who learned about totalitarianism from the inside during his youth, and has funded his own vision of that technocratic system. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's just what any billionaire criminal with a will to power seeking to build a empire would do, and imo, he has.