Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you go to buy or sell something, do you inform the seller or buyer that they are incorrectly pricing the product/service they are selling? Do you let your counterparty know that you are willing to pay or sell at a price that is more beneficial to them?
They already knew, by my reading. Bankers knew there was a bubble which is why it wasn't just Soros. He convinced quite a few banks and investors to help him in this scheme (and make quite a bit of cash as well) in order to pull it off. From the article: - George Soros and all the funds and banks that participated in this large-scale attack were then able to repay the loans they had taken out in sterling, but with a…
The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
101–110 of 182 posts
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was your fault for not putting on a helmet and allowing me to hit you with a steel pipe and take your money. See the problem? There's a reason it's illegal to exploit vulnerabilities in software. It's even illegal to exploit them in humans (mostly). It's called fraud.
In a world where there are people that will hit you with a steel pipe and will not be stopped by the legality of the matter then it is your fault for not putting on the helmet. But that isn't a good comparison for this case as what he did was not illegal. Unlike hitting people with steel pipes.
Our pipe-wielding example will just find another victim without a helmet. You can always find something a victim could have done differently, the only common thread is the perpetrator.
Also legality isn't a proxy for morality. Slavery was illegal. Some societies allowed cannibalism. What Soros did had a human cost and the fact someone else might have done the same financial alchemy had he not doesn't excuse it.
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#103The 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 Whiteh…
Didn’t Soros study under Karl Popper? I wouldn’t say he learned totalitarianism from the inside, rather he was influenced by a very astute advisor on the nature of societal openness and the associated dynamics. As far as being supposedly ‘evil’, I don’t see how anyone in his position could not be. Look at the world around us. We are ruled by psychopaths, shysters and ghouls at multiple levels; middle management to he…
I think what we now recite as Popper's paraphrase is just a cheap slogan for organizing banal minds, and not a model for reflection. My objection isn't to Popper and so-called open socieites, it's to the belief that the "problem," is the lack of a sophisticated plan with a system guided by ideology to run them in the first place. It's a technocratic presumption, that if we just come up with a system, we can impose it on reality and human desire, and we will "fix the problem."
What Popper has been used for (regardless of what he may have written), and the viral idea that critical theorists today have made that people fundamentally want was this very justification for their own monsterousness. This is the liberation they're offering. When you revisit the idea of being a victim or being oppressed as just an infinite will to power, moralized by an ideology designed to dissolve truth and inconvenient perceptions of reality, it's pretty obvious that the OSF and its appendant bodies in the WEF and other networks are just recycled totalitarian junk from a new generation of demagogues.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a bunch of billionaires and bureaucrats have had Damascene conversions and are really just self sacrificing martyrs and saints.
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#104In Brazil the alt-right calls Soros a lefist billionare that finances communism around the world. Does this craziness exist in other places of the world?
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Soros and his allies were not using confidential information; they were not insiders. I am not a fan of this kind of thing at all, but insider trading laws aren't relevant. As for your last point, yes, if the Bank of England had surrendered earlier they would have lost far less money and Soros and his allies would have made far less profit.
Talking with a group of investors behind closed doors to agree and execute a strategy seems like a very obvious market manipulation.
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bank of England which was responsible for artificially pumping up the value of sterling is a more appropriate target for blame.
Is that what actually happened in this case, though? (Not a rhetorical question, I honestly don't know). I ask because the decision to short the pound was a coordinated attack among many powerful financial institutions. There is a reason collusion in other economic areas is illegal, precisely because it allows a "mispricing" to occur compared to what would happen if their were arms-length, fair competition. Again, I…
The "insight" that Soros and others like him had was when would this happen. It's been known to be unstable for years, it was known to break eventually (unless rates go up, by a lot), the only question was when.
Also, this outcome was what "the people wanted". As I wrote above, there was not enough buy-in to jack up the rates and save the currency at the expense of jobs, so the opposite happened, jobs were saved at the expense of the currency. Low currency isn't necessarily bad - it's good for some people and bad for other people. In fact these days countries routinely accuse other countries of suppressing the value of their currency, to facilitate a desirable trade balance (China vs US, as an example; remember Trump's tariffs?).
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#107It's great to talk in terms of indices and devaluations and of "breaking the bank of England". The lives affected are not even spared an afterthought.
If you were a British factory worker, it might have saved your job because British exports became more competitive.
If you were a middle class office worker, it probably made life more inconvenient because imported goods became more expensive, and that Spanish vacation you had been planning might now be out of reach.
If you were a member of the upper class, your wealth was probably already well hedged against GBP risk by using offshore currency accounts, foreign stock investments, etc.
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might even say forcing the prices of things to be accurate and exposing departures from reality is the purpose of financial markets and the thing an investor gets paid for. (How well that works is questionable; my completely amateur impression is that this view would force us to legalize insider trading while declaring HFT completely useless, for example.)
> declaring HFT completely useless, for example. Please do ! The amount of resources invested in making HFT possible and profitable is no where close to being justified by the benefits it brings to society as a whole. Making financial information move in days instead of week ? Sure !. In hours instead of days ? Yep !. In minutes instead of hours ? Why Not !. In seconds instead of minutes ? Mmmh yeah, I guess. In mill…
In terms of resources, Virtu is publicly traded and has a market cap of 6.3bn, Citadel was recently valued at 22bn, the total sector is maybe 100bn. Meanwhile our society ascribes about 260bn of value to Coca Cola alone.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feab...
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#109In Brazil the alt-right calls Soros a lefist billionare that finances communism around the world. Does this craziness exist in other places of the world?
Re: The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> declaring HFT completely useless, for example. Please do ! The amount of resources invested in making HFT possible and profitable is no where close to being justified by the benefits it brings to society as a whole. Making financial information move in days instead of week ? Sure !. In hours instead of days ? Yep !. In minutes instead of hours ? Why Not !. In seconds instead of minutes ? Mmmh yeah, I guess. In mill…
Are they? Spreads have tightened massively since the advent of HFT which has knock-on effects for the small investor both in terms of cheaper personal trading and lower costs for those managing their retirement/mutual funds (see Vanguard's opinion on HFT[1]). In terms of resources, Virtu is publicly traded and has a market cap of 6.3bn, Citadel was recently valued at 22bn, the total sector is maybe 100bn. Meanwhile o…