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

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

#161

Post by sonotathrowaway »

noodles_nomore wrote: post #150
bidirectional wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? No offence but it just sounds like conspiratorial nonsense based on some scary sounding terms. Payment for order flow is an example of the incentives of retail traders, retail brokers and HFT market makers aligning. The market makers are able (and obligated) to improve prices because they have paid to receive flow they are almost certain is not toxic. Meanwhile they charge the likes of hedge funds higher prices…

The book Flash Boys deals with this. It's a long time since I read it, but IIRC brokers need to split large orders and route them to different exchanges to get the best price (which is required under 'best-effort execution'). These orders will hit the exchanges at different times giving enough time for HFT to observe them at one exchange and front-run them at the other.

Most large orders won’t be retail traders though.

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

#162

Post by jen20 »

lupire wrote: post #159
jen20 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the UK, if you're on a high rate (but a short contract), you can at least look forward to when interest rates fall. At the cost of never being able to predict your monthly outgoings in the face of turbulent financial markets.

so people will take smaller loans and pay less. This is good.

Which is absolutely not what happens. It’s manifestly not “good” by any definition.

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

#163

Post by DeWilde »

drekk wrote: post #102
DeWilde wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I appreciate the honesty and consistency at least of doubling down on blaming the victim. 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 s…

I never made a case for legality == morality. Also beware that morality isn't equally defined, what you find moral others will find amoral.

As for the pipe and helmet example. The laws and ways of upholding them are the metaphorical helmet that we put on to protect ourselves against pipe wielders.

The perpetrator will do what it wants to do, we can protect ourselves with laws, law enforcement, education or physical armour. Or do you expect the pipe wielder to stop because they were told what they are doing is bad or amoral?

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

#164

Post by psd1 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #125
fmvab wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the outcome was better for Britain in the end, but I object to glorifying Soros on the grounds that his intentions were clearly to take money out of the system, and breaking the pound with a coordinated attack just doesn’t seem very ethical. I also think that when people characterize moves like this as ‘brilliant’ it does a disservice to the word. I think many folks, if they tuned their attention to opportuni…

I really don't think intentions matter when contemplating moral questions, outcomes matter. Every economist was saying the peg would be broken, yet the bank of england was committed to throwing away money trying to save it. Every day they continued the british people were worse off. Soros was a hero in this story for being the person who convinced the bank of england to end their fools errand.

That's begging the question. Clearly someone thought that Britain would be better off in the ERM at that rate, and clearly some economists thought the rate could be maintained

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

#165

Post by daniel-cussen »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #37
unmole wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

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.)

This is true.

Speculators play a vital role in stabilizing the price of a commodity over time. All other forms of arbitrage are meaningless besides the biggest one of them all: temporal arbitrage. Buy low sell high. And with it, sell high buy low.

Government employees, for instance for Codelco, Chile's state-owned mining corporation, value speculators because those speculations are the best predictions of the future. Suddenly you can make guarantees to your stakeholders, and sell futures, and plan, feed the prediction into your other math.

Also I'm not sure HFT is totally useless. If you set a minimum latency in the market and forbade anybody go around that you would get cheaters, and less integrity, and roll back trades. Instead, with HFT, the only challenge of the fastest is to really be the fastest. They gotta win. Further, at a societal level, I divine there are harmful macro artifacts that happen at large multiples of HFT's granularity. So when the latency was milliseconds, artifacts happened in years, in microseconds, they happened in days.

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

#166

Post by lupire »

mikeyouse wrote: post #142
IAmEveryone wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia: Tivadar [his father] saved not only his immediate family but also many other Hungarian Jews, and Soros later wrote that 1944 had been "the happiest [year] of his life," for it had given him the opportunity to witness his father's heroism.[ Stop lying.

The idea that Soros, who was a 13-year old Hungarian Jew pretending to be christian as to not be murdered by the Nazis, somehow was sympathetic to the nazis is one of the laziest attempts at smearing someone I can remember.

The accusation is not that he sympathized with the Nazis. Quite the contrary, the accusation is that he has no sympathy for anyone. The accusation is that his worldview, was (and is) that he is responsible only for himself and he has no effect on affairs because if he didn't do [whatever] someone else would. He claims, on essence, that the events of the world is an unchangeable script, and the only control we have is which role we play. For an expert in markets, he claims stunning ignorance of the concept of marginal effects, and a non-stunning awareness of how to profit from amorality.

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

#167

Post by lupire »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #160
shrubble wrote: post #84

"I am there to make money; I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do" - George Soros Someone who explicitly says that as a teenager, he enjoyed his time working for the Nazis while they were looting those targeted, is not going to be shamed over taking $1 billion in a trade. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGWizajL7tA compilation of clips from 60 Minutes interviews, etc. (from 3m45s he tal…

I had thought poorly of George Soros based on other people's words, before reading all of the comments written thus far in this thread. Watching the video you linked, cemented my notion that Goeorge Soros is being treated as a scapegoat. Thank you for sharing the video, as I had never actually listened to him speak before. In that video, he seems like a logical and emotional person who can keep emotions in their prop…

He explicitly didn't say he was happy he developed. He said he was happy, and that happiness was possible because he was solipsistic and concerned only for his own position.

And how can you congratulate someone for being logical, high IQ/EQ while being disappointed that they don't believe in God, which is an illogical idea and emotional crutch?

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

#168

Post by lupire »

motohagiography wrote: post #103
gunfighthacksaw wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be monsterous and justified, what a triumph of moral expedience. Soros experienced WWII as a teenager in Hungary(?) where growing up he saw the rise of the movements that would become NSDAP and Stalinsim, respectively. My view is that the most powerful thing he has ever experienced was that evil, but in seeing the power of them, he understood what was possible, and his intent is to use them for "good." Trouble is,…

If you believe that everyone is either evil or irrelevant, as you say, then why waste your time caring? You've proven that nothing matters.

How is protesrint against police brutality, and supporting Israel-Palestine peace activists, totalitarian?

How can you equate having nonzero will to power (resisting oppression) with infinite will to power? How can you claim that resisting rotalitarianism is equal to totalitarianism?

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

#169

Post by lupire »

motohagiography wrote: post #50

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 Whiteh…

It's a bit silly to call someone "totalitarianist" when his whole career and wealth is from betting against bad governments and winning.

But if you equate "wealthy" with "totalitarian", you are too far gone to debate with.

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

#170

Post by lupire »

regularfry wrote: post #81
jddil wrote: post #70

The Day the Bank of England was caught in an artificial pumping scheme is way more accurate of a title. But I guess anything to smear Soros and the "left" gets upvoted to HN nowadays. Connection being the authoritative right sees Soros as the analog to the Koch bros.... not quite understanding we don't like capitalists anymore than the right likes socialists. But hey Soros === bad, leftist === bad so to the top of HN…

George Soros has been known as "The Man Who Broke The Bank of England" pretty much since it happened. It's a riff on a much earlier phrase, "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo", which has been around since the 19th century, referring to a gambler. It pre-dates the current right's antisemitic obsession with him by quite a long way, and I don't think it's been used as a pejorative term at all - more a mark of re…

The confusion in this thread is that some people think "breaking the bank" is an insult to the breaker, because the bank is the "good guy".

It's a bit bizarre.

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