CANR
WORK TITLE: IN DEFENSE OF OPEN SOCIETY
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
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CITY: New York
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 284
http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book/hardcover/the-tragedy-of-the-european-union/9781610394215
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary; immigrated to United States, 1956; naturalized U.S. citizen, 1961; son of Tivadar Soros and Elizabeth Szucs; married Annaliese Witschak, 1961 (divorced, 1981); married Susan Weber (an art historian), 1983 (divorced); married Tamiko Bolton, 2013; children: (first marriage) Robert Andrea, Jonathan; (second marriage) Alexander, Gregory.
EDUCATION:London School of Economics, B.A. and B.S., 1952, M.A., D.Phil.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Financier and writer. Handbag and jewelry salesman, Blackpool, England, 1952; during early career, also a trainee at British investment bank Singer and Friedlander; arbitrage trader for various firms, including Wertheim & Co., F.M. Mayer, and Arnhold & S. Bleichroader, 1956-66; created Quantum Fund, 1969; president of Soros Fund Management, 1973—. Open Society Institute, chair, set up Open Society Fund, 1979. Philanthropist, 1979—; established the Central European University in both Budapest, Hungary, and Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1990; since 1991 has set up numerous funds, including Quantum Emerging Growth, Quantum Realty Trust, Quasar International, and Quota; established the International Science Foundation, 1992; founded Global Power Investments, 1994. Council on Foreign Relations, member of board of directors, director, beginning 1995.
AWARDS:Laurea Honoris Causa, University of Bologna, 1995; named honorary citizen of Budapest, Hungary; Yale International Center for Finance Award, Yale School of Management, 2000; inductee Alpha Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame, 2008; Honorary Fellow of British Academy, 2017; Person of the Year, Financial Times, 2018; Ridenhour Prize for Courage, 2019.
RELIGION: Atheist.WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, Financial Times, and Moskovskiye Novosti (Moscow News).
SIDELIGHTS
George Soros’s life is one of the most spectacular rags-to-riches stories ever told. As one of the shrewdest investors to take on stock markets around the world, he has risen from a penniless immigrant to a man whose personal wealth is calculated in the billions of dollars. When Soros makes public his investment strategies, ripple effects appear in markets everywhere as other investors scramble to copy his tactics.
Soros was born in 1930 to an upper-middle-class Jewish couple living in Budapest, Hungary. Although the family was not orthodox, the ravages of World War II and the Nazi regime hit very close to home. The Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, and by the time of their defeat in 1945, approximately 400,000 of the one million Jews living in Hungary had perished in the Holocaust. The Soros family withstood the Nazi occupation by obtaining false identification papers. Young Soros pretended to be the son of a Hungarian government official. George and his parents lived with the constant threat of being exposed as Jews and executed, but the family ultimately survived the war.
In 1947 Soros left Hungary, which was then under Soviet authority, and went to London. He became a student at the London School of Economics and worked a series of part-time jobs to support himself. While at school, Soros became acquainted with philosophy professor Karl Popper. Popper taught his theory of an “open society,” which Soros embraced wholeheartedly. Popper taught that communism and fascism were “closed societies” in which the upper and ruling classes held that only they could possess knowledge and truth, which was hoarded through force. On the opposite side, said Popper, were “open societies” in which the people realized that knowledge is flawed and encouraged this through debate.
After graduating in 1952, Soros eventually landed a position at a British investment bank, where he was finally able to gain firsthand experience with stock markets. After immigrating to the United States, he became an arbitrage trader for a series of investment firms, while at the same time continuing his philosophical reflections on an open society that he learned at school. In 1962 Soros and his investment partner, Jim Rogers, created their own private hedge fund from several million dollars in start-up capital culled from wealthy investors. The Quantum Fund, as they named it, was established in Curaçao, in the Netherlands Antilles. Such an “offshore” fund is not subject to the same stringent regulations as other funds established in the United States. Hedge funds are also typically riskier investments than the average mutual or pension funds. Soros invested in everything he could in any country: stocks, bonds, currencies, futures, and commodities. With Soros at the helm, Quantum eventually became one of the most prosperous hedge funds ever created.
In 1987 Soros completed his first book, The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market, in which he detailed his philosophical approach to financial markets. According to Soros, his personal theory of “reflexivity” has been his touchstone to success. Soros’s theory states that there is no such thing as a perfect market because all systems and strategies are flawed because the people that created them are inherently flawed. He takes advantage of seeing the market as imperfect to create wealth.
A reviewer for the Economist wondered whether Soros’s theories offer a new insight or simply state the obvious. The same reviewer observed that “what nobody should doubt, though, is that ‘reflexivity’ as a tool has helped Mr. Soros make a fortune.” The Alchemy of Finance remained on the New York Times best-seller list for many weeks.
In 1979 Soros set up the Open Society Fund, which would become his personal vehicle to promote the ideas he had gleaned from Karl Popper while in school. The Open Society Fund seeks to give money to help “closed” societies become “open.” The fund has given money to many nations, including South Africa, Hungary, China, the Soviet Union, Poland, the Ukraine, Albania, Kyrgyzstan, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Sarajevo, the Czech Republic, and Belarus. Money is given for items and programs that can aid in promoting democratic ideas, including scholarships, research grants, photocopying machines, newspapers, magazines, and travel grants. Soros’s foundations also give humanitarian aid. In some instances, Soros’s level of aid has exceeded that of the United States.
In Soros’s 1990 book, Opening the Soviet System, Soros tells how he and his foundations contributed to the downfall of communism. He also explains how the Russians desperately need Western aid to stabilize their monetary system and prevent civil war. An Economist critic lauded Soros for his well-placed aid and grants in opening up communism, reporting that “these were seeds of civil society that helped crack the communist concrete.”
Underwriting Democracy: Encouraging Free Enterprise and Democratic Reform among the Soviets and in Eastern Europe, Soros’s 1991 book, expands upon the crisis plaguing the Soviet Union at the time. He continues to urge the West to give financial aid to Soviet reformers who can transform the country into an open society while at the same time expressing that he feels all hope is lost. Soros also admits to having a messiah complex. He states that his new goal is to personally oversee, through his donations, the transition for the Soviet Union from a former communist state to an open society. Soros uses Underwriting Democracy to expand upon his theories of reflexivity and the open society. Robert Reich, writing in the New Republic, felt that “the reader is given the impression of a talented man who no longer knows where the boundary lies between himself and a grandiose fantasy of himself.”
Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve, Soros’s 1995 autobiographical book, expounds upon his philosophies, the reasons for his extensive philanthropy, and his ideas on politics in Europe. In the book, which is in essence a series of interviews, Soros details his childhood during the Holocaust and the steps he took to become a successful and wealthy man.
In the Times Literary Supplement, Roger Boyes commented that “the truth about Soros is not that he is a secret unrecognized philosopher … but that he is a gambler. He bets on currencies and becomes rich.”
The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, published in 1998, once again forwards Soros’s views on reflexivity and the open society. He also goes further and develops his own ideas about saving financial marketplaces that are on the brink of collapse. Soros intersperses these visions with his own thoughts on social and universal values. “It is an important book for this confused moment in economic history, and Soros is a rare voice, willing to risk his own legendary status and speak directly,” William Greider enthusiastically wrote in the Nation.
In the 1990s Soros began to turn his philanthropic efforts toward the United States. He supported projects that give aid to immigrants and research centers that are looking at alternatives to prisons. Soros has also given money in support of needle exchange programs, legalized marijuana referendums, and assisted suicide.
With later works, Soros demonstrated that he was still concerned with the multifaceted issues generated by global capitalism and globalization. Two additional books explore these subjects and concepts in considerable depth. In Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, Soros makes a case for the establishment of open societies throughout the world that are willing not only to entertain the possibility of change and improvement, but to implement strategies and policies that will make such change and improvement a reality. With a strong background in helping to open up previously closed societies such as Soviet Russia, Soros speaks from direct experience. He posits that the global economy as it exists is already a form of open society, and one that has felt the devastation of economic policies that do not work in areas such as Asia’s economic crisis in the late 1990s and the evaporation of Russia’s currency.
Soros “reflects an almost anticapitalist bias” in the book, observed Library Journal reviewer Richard Drezen. For critic David C. Korten, writing in Tikkun, Soros presents an interesting view of capitalism but offers suggestions for reforms that will ultimately be unworkable. “After presenting a devastating critique of capitalism sure to beguile progressives and infuriate market fundamentalists, [Soros] concludes that global capitalism is the best of all possible worlds and sets forth a program of ‘reforms’ that on close reading are little more than a call to give yet more money and power to the stewards of global capitalism—the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank,” Korten remarked. Korten concluded that as readers of Soros’s work, “we must be skeptical of the public pretensions of persons of means who profess to serve two masters,” benevolent desire for world improvement and the demonstrated adherence to the strongest forms of capitalism.
Soros again examines the subject of globalization, a concept he regards with favor, in George Soros on Globalization. Tackling complicated issues in simplified ways, Soros looks at the wide disparity between those who would remove all impediments—such as taxation and regulation—that provide any sort of barriers to international investing and economic activity, and those who see globalization as an immoral, even evil force in the world. Soros “contends that the market is amoral but that certain reforms are necessary to ensure ethical standards,” stated Mary Frances Wilkens in a Booklist review. “Instead of dismantling existing international financial and trade institutions, though, Soros suggests reform,” noted a Publishers Weekly critic.
Soros advises in George Soros on Globalization that steps should be taken to stabilize the often tumultuous global financial markets. He seeks to make global financial organizations such as the IMF and the WTO more responsive to the needs and interests of developing nations that do not have the financial strength or stability to withstand global market turbulence. Soros suggests implementing what he calls special drawing rights, or SDRs, which are particular kinds of reserve monies available to all countries through the IMF. Under his plan, developing nations would keep the funds from their SDRs to use when needed, and richer developed nations would contribute their SDRs to the cause of development and providing global public goods. He suggests a means whereby Western aid for development projects in poorer nations receives greater screening and oversight by a panel of appropriate independent experts who can determine who is eligible for aid and can further evaluate aid recipients that have been chosen. Soros also wants more aid to go toward countries meeting international standards in areas such as education, environment, and labor. A reviewer for the Economist observed that Soros’s book “demonstrates that he has laudable goals and some good instincts.” Soros’s suggestions, “wisely implemented … would give economic change a more humane face,” commented Jedediah Purdy in Ethics & International Affairs. A Business Week critic concluded that “the book is useful as an eloquent summary of the chief criticisms leveled against global institutions—even if you disagree with Soros’s proposals for reform.”
Among the reasons behind Soros’s notoriety is his virulent dislike of the presidency and policies of George W. Bush. In addition to spending millions of dollars of his own money in an attempt to prevent Bush’s reelection, he also puts his intellectual abilities and economic prowess behind sharp criticism of the Bush administration’s policies and functions. In The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, “Soros uses the metaphor of the economic bubble to show that the Bush administration’s foreign policy is based on assumptions that are not only incorrect and deceptive but also will eventually burst,” explained Ilene Cooper in Booklist. “Using the analogy of a financial boom-and-bust, Soros speculates that the convergence of the neo-conservatives’ objectives with the paralyzing of normal restraints produced by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks has produced exaggerated rhetorical goals beyond America’s capacity to sustain materially or politically,” observed Stephen Hoadley in the New Zealand International Review. Further, Hoadley noted: “U.S. policies are alienating allies and friends, undermining world order, and perpetrating injustice.”
Soros is particularly critical of the administration’s seemingly unending war on terror and the war in Iraq. To begin recovering from these troubles, Soros offers numerous suggestions that begin at the fundamental level of the people, rather than at the level of the state. He is adamant that foreign aid be spent so that it benefits people locally and directly, and he also believes that revenues from a country’s natural resources should benefit the people who live there. He offers further suggestions based largely on his concept of the open society, policy changes that would create a “balance between sovereignty and terror prevention” and “cooperative initiatives and international assistance,” stated Library Journal reviewer Jack Forman.
After the financial crisis in 2008, Soros released The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. In the book, Soros claims that the crisis was in part caused by the equilibrium theory of traditional economics. He states the theory is flawed because it does not account for the unpredictability of human behavior. Soros also suggests that credit expansion is dangerous, as price fluctuation can have detrimental effects. Also, the pressure on companies to continue to expand can lead to trouble. Additionally, Soros explains the criteria he takes into account when investing. He analyzes macroeconomic conditions and market trends, and he takes short-term positions on those trends. In the book, he includes information on his trading decisions for the first quarter of 2008.
A writer on the Blogvesting Web site suggested: “His description of his many years in Wall Street makes for an interesting read, and his grasp of macroeconomics issues is very impressive.” The writer later described the book as “interesting and thought provoking.” Lauren D. Klein, a contributor to the Journal of International Affairs, described the book as “insightful.”
Soros explores the problems that created the crisis in the European and American markets in Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States. He argues that the euro currency is flawed, and he suggests that the European Union faces much difficulty because of the disparity of the nations it includes. He poses the hypothetical situation in which Germany would leave the European Union, and he analyzes the effects it would have.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted Soros’s success and experience in the financial markets and stated: “It’s well worth paying attention to his views on the world’s financial systems.” The reviewer also highlighted the complex economic concepts included in the book and wrote that it is “not for the faint of heart or the innumerate. For policy and financial wonks, a bracing read.”
In his 2012 book, My Philanthropy, Soros details the causes to which he contributes money. The book is divided into three sections. The first is an essay by Soros, explaining why he gives and to which organizations. In the second section, former journalist Chuck Sudetic provides an analysis of Soros’s giving. Finally, the book includes an afterword written by Aryeh Neier, once the chief executive of the group that eventually became Human Rights Watch.
Oliver Kamm reviewed My Philanthropy on the Jewish Chronicle Web site. Kamm suggested: “George Soros’s public activities are a conundrum. While containing much interesting detail, this unsatisfying book fails to resolve it.”
According to a host of measures, the European Union (EU) has been a staggering success. First conceived in the 1950s—in the guise of the humble European Coal and Steel Community—the European Union has developed into a vibrant and cohesive single market whose policies allow for the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital across much of the European continent. With a combined population of over 500 million and a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) constituting a staggering twenty-three percent of global nominal GDP, the European Union has turned once-fractious, competitive Europe into one of the world’s most successful economies. Yet, as Soros details in the series of interviews that make up The Tragedy of the European Union: Disintegration or Revival?, the European Union as it is now known could be headed for history’s proverbial dustbin. Restive polities in its major players—countries like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—are increasingly swayed by xenophobic rhetoric and are growing more suspicious of the countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. Soros makes clear that the European Union has degenerated from an enlightened common market to a combative collection of unfriendly states, many of whom have seen their fortunes sour and become dependent on a reluctant and resentful German economic powerhouse. He argues in The Tragedy of the European Union that it is conceivable that the EU could fragment irrevocably, producing economic and political chaos in a region once renowned for its stability. While Soros describes the many ills plaguing the European Union, he also offers prescriptions. He contends that institutional reforms—particularly those designed to rein in the EU’s powerful and largely unregulated financial institutions—could restore public faith in the European Union and make it viable in the twenty-first century.
Reviewers, for the most part, responded favorably to The Tragedy of the European Union, and most concluded that Soros elucidates well the challenges facing the EU in its current incarnation. Though most conceded that Soros is adept at diagnosing the ills facing the world’s largest common market, many grumbled that he is less capable of devising realistic, workable panaceas to its myriad ailments. Raoul Ruparel, for instance, noted in his Forbes review of The Tragedy of the European Union that Soros “has lofty goals and ambitions for the EU but it is not clear that the paths he offers to achieve them quite fit with the reality of the political and economic situation in Europe. While it is easy to call for deeper integration it is much harder to achieve, not least because it requires lengthy changes to the EU Treaties and probably referenda in many countries. As such it would be a long and painful process, with no guarantee of success.” Other reviewers noted that Soros’s deep knowledge of European politics and economics make The Tragedy of the European Union a thoughtful and bracing read but might limit its appeal. A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded that The Tragedy of the European Union is intended for “economics and policy wonks, to be sure, but with interesting insights into the functioning of one of the world’s most powerful—and potentially far more so—economic blocs.”
Released in 2019, In Defense of Open Society finds Soros summarizing his views on a range of topics, including philanthropy, climate change, social media, extremism, Brexit, refugees, and economics. The volume is comprised of speech transcripts and previously-published works by Soros, including excerpts from books and articles he contributed to publications. In a speech he presented at the World Economic Forum in 2018, which is included in the book, Soros highlights the elements he perceives to be the biggest threats to Europe and the U.S. He calls out the dangers of the faltering two-party American political system, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, social control through the use of technology, and the destruction of the natural environment. As in his previous book, Soros warns of the potential fall of the European Union. Here, he suggests that Brexit could prove to set a dangerous precedent, as individual countries become more territorial. Additionally, the influx of refugees and economic stagnation could also become major problems for the E.U. Other topics Soros discusses in this volume include his founding of the Central European University and the motivations behind his efforts in philanthropy.
In a review of In Defense of Open Society on the Publishers Weekly website, a critic suggested: “This is an accessible starting point for those seeking insights into Soros’s current thinking.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book as “an impassioned analysis of what [Soros] considers the most pressing political, social, and economic problems” and “a timely appeal for radical change.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Kaufman, Michael T., Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.
Tier, Mark, The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffet and George Soros, St. Martin’s Griffin (New York, NY), 2006.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2002, Mary Frances Wilkens, review of George Soros on Globalization, p. 1196; December 15, 2003, Ilene Cooper, review of The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, p. 706.
Business Week, April 8, 2002, review of George Soros on Globalization, p. 18.
Ecologist, June, 2001, Caspar Henderson, review of Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, p. 55.
Economist, October 10, 1987, review of The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market, p. 89; July 28, 1990, review of Opening the Soviet System, p. 73; May 4, 2002, review of George Soros on Globalization; January 31, 2004, review of The Bubble of American Supremacy, p. 81.
Ethics & International Affairs, October, 2002, Jedediah Purdy, review of George Soros on Globalization, p. 143.
Independent (London, England), July 7, 2006, Boyd Tonkin, review of The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror.
Journal of International Affairs, fall-winter, 2008, Lauren D. Klein, review of The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, p. 250.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2012, review of Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States; April 1, 2014, review of The Tragedy of the European Union: Disintegration or Revival?; September 15, 2019, review of In Defense of Open Society.
Library Journal, September 1, 1991, review of Underwriting Democracy: Encouraging Free Enterprise and Democratic Reform among the Soviets and in Eastern Europe, p. 214; November 15, 2000, Richard Drezen, review of Open Society, p. 79; March 15, 2003, Susan C. Awe, review of George Soros on Globalization, p. 64; March 1, 2004, Jack Forman, review of The Bubble of American Supremacy, p. 93.
Nation, February 15, 1999, William Greider, review of The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, p. 25.
New Republic, October 14, 1991, Robert Reich, review of Underwriting Democracy, p. 50.
New Statesman, June 2, 2003, Neil Clark, profile of George Soros; March 15, 2004, Robert Skidelsky, review of The Bubble of American Supremacy, p. 50; February 13, 2012, review of Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, p. 46.
New York Review of Books, April 24, 2014, Gregor Peter Schmitz, author interview.
New York Times, October 8, 1995, Adam Smith, review of Soros on Soros, p. 34.
New Zealand International Review, July-August, 2004, Stephen Hoadley, review of The Bubble of American Supremacy, p. 29.
Publishers Weekly, March 18, 2002, review of George Soros on Globalization, p. 91.
Reason, March, 2003, Charles Oliver, review of George Soros on Globalization, p. 59.
Spectator, March 6, 2004, Mark Archer, review of The Bubble of American Supremacy, p. 46.
Systems Research and Behavioral Science, November-December, 2001, John N. Warfield, review of The Crisis of Global Capitalism, p. 577.
Tikkun, March, 2001, David C. Korten, review of Open Society, p. 71.
Times Literary Supplement, March 1, 1996, Roger Boyes, review of Soros on Soros, p. 10.
ONLINE
BBC, https://www.bbc.com/ (September 7, 2019), article about author.
Biography, https://www.biography.com/ (October 3, 2019), author biography.
Blogvesting, http://www.blogvesting.com/ (September 8, 2008), review of The New Paradigm for Financial Markets.
Discover the Networks, http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/ (December 9, 2012), author biography.
Forbes Online, http://www.forbes.com/ (March 13, 2014), Raoul Ruparel, review of The Tragedy of the European Union.
George Soros, http://www.georgesoros.com (October 17, 2019).
Jewish Chronicle Online, http://www.thejc.com/ (October 11, 2011), Oliver Kamm, review of My Philanthropy.
Open Europe Blog, http://openeuropeblog.blogspot.com/ (March 13, 2014), review of The Tragedy of the European Union.
Open Society Foundations, http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/ (October 17, 2019), author biography.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (September 6, 2019), review of In Defense of Open Society.
The Life of George Soros
George Soros is one of the world’s foremost philanthropists. He has given away more than $32 billion of his personal fortune to fund the Open Society Foundations’ work around the world. He is also the founder and primary funder of the Central European University in Budapest, a leading regional center for the study of the social sciences.
Under his leadership, the Open Society Foundations have supported individuals and organizations across the globe fighting for freedom of expression, accountable government, and societies that promote justice and equality. The foundations have also provided school and university fees for thousands of promising students who would otherwise have been excluded from opportunities because of their identity or where they live.
This giving has often focused on those who face discrimination purely for who they are. He has supported groups representing Europe’s Roma people, and others pushed to the margins of mainstream society, such as drug users, sex workers, and LGBTI people.
Soros has experienced such intolerance firsthand. Born in Hungary in 1930, he lived through the Nazi occupation of 1944–1945, which resulted in the murder of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews. His own Jewish family survived by securing false identity papers, concealing their backgrounds, and helping others do the same. Soros later recalled that “instead of submitting to our fate, we resisted an evil force that was much stronger than we were—yet we prevailed. Not only did we survive, but we managed to help others.”
As the Communists consolidated power in Hungary after the war, Soros left Budapest in 1947 for London, working part-time as a railway porter and as a night-club waiter to support his studies at the London School of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States, entering the world of finance and investments, where he was to make his fortune.
In 1970, he launched his own hedge fund, Soros Fund Management, and went on to become one of the most successful investors in the history of the United States.
Soros used his fortune to create the Open Society Foundations—a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 100 countries. Their name and work reflect the influence on Soros’s thinking of the philosophy of Karl Popper, which Soros first encountered at the London School of Economics. In his book Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argues that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter of truth, and that societies can only flourish when they allow for democratic governance, freedom of expression, and respect for individual rights—an approach at the core of the Open Society Foundations’ work.
Soros began his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he helped promote the open exchange of ideas in Communist Hungary, by funding academic visits to the West, and supporting fledgling independent cultural groups and other initiatives. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he created the Central European University as a space to foster critical thinking—at that time an alien concept at most universities in the former Communist bloc. With the Cold War over, he gradually expanded his philanthropy to the United States, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, supporting a vast array of new efforts to create more accountable, transparent, and democratic societies. He was one of the early prominent voices to criticize the war on drugs as “arguably more harmful than the drug problem itself,” and helped kick-start America’s medical marijuana movement. In the early 2000s, he became a vocal backer of same-sex marriage efforts. Though his causes evolved over time, they continued to hew closely to his ideals of an open society.
His giving has reached beyond his own foundations, supporting independent organizations such as Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Now in his 80s, Soros continues to take an active personal interest in the Open Society Foundations’ work, traveling widely to support their work and advocating for positive policy changes with world leaders both publicly and privately.
In 2017, the Open Society Foundations announced that Soros had transferred $18 billion of his fortune into an endowment that would be fund the future work of the foundations, bringing his total giving to the foundations since 1984 to over $30 billion.
Throughout Soros’s philanthropic legacy, one thing has remained constant: a commitment to fighting the world’s most intractable problems. He has been known to emphasize the importance of tackling losing causes. Indeed, many of the issues Soros has taken on—and he would be the first to admit this—are the types of issues for which a complete solution might never emerge.
“My success in the financial markets has given me a greater degree of independence than most other people,” Soros once wrote. That independence has allowed him to forge his own path towards a world that’s more open, more just, and more equitable for all.
Born in Budapest in 1930, George Soros is chair of Soros Fund Management LLC. As one of history’s most successful financiers, his views on investing and economic issues are widely followed. This is the official site for information about George Soros.
George Soros
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"Soros" redirects here. For other uses, see Soros (disambiguation).
George Soros
Soros at the 2011 Munich Security Conference
Born
Schwartz György[1][2]
August 12, 1930 (age 89)
Budapest, Hungary
Citizenship
Hungary, United States[3]
Education
London School of Economics (BA, MA, DPhil)
Occupation
Investor, hedge fund manager, author, and philanthropist
Known for
Managing Soros Fund Management
Founding the Open Society Foundations
Advising the Quantum Fund
Target of several conspiracy theories
Net worth
US$8.3 billion (November 2018)[4]
Spouse(s)
Annaliese Witschak
(m. 1960; div. 1983)
Susan Weber
(m. 1983; div. 2005)
Tamiko Bolton
(m. 2013)
Children
5, including Jonathan and Alexander
Relatives
Paul Soros (brother)
Website
Official website
George Soros,[a] Hon FBA (born Schwartz György; August 12, 1930)[1][2] is a Hungarian-American[b] investor and philanthropist.[8][9] As of February 2018, he had a net worth of $8 billion,[10] having donated more than $32 billion to his philanthropic agency, Open Society Foundations.[11]
Born in Budapest, Soros survived Nazi Germany-occupied Hungary and emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1947. He attended the London School of Economics, graduating with a bachelor's and eventually a master's degree in philosophy. Soros began his business career by taking various jobs at merchant banks in the United Kingdom and then the United States, before starting his first hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969. Profits from his first fund furnished the seed money to start Soros Fund Management, his second hedge fund, in 1970. Double Eagle was renamed to Quantum Fund and was the principal firm Soros advised. At its founding, Quantum Fund had $12 million in assets under management, and as of 2011 it had $25 billion, the majority of Soros's overall net worth.[12]
Soros is known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" because of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of pounds sterling, which made him a profit of $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.[13] Based on his early studies of philosophy, Soros formulated an application of Karl Popper's General Theory of Reflexivity to capital markets, which he claims renders him a clear picture of asset bubbles and fundamental/market value of securities, as well as value discrepancies used for shorting and swapping stocks.[14]
Soros is a well-known supporter of progressive and liberal political causes, to which he dispenses donations through his foundation, the Open Society Foundations.[15] Between 1979 and 2011, he donated more than $11 billion to various philanthropic causes;[16][17] by 2017, his donations "on civil initiatives to reduce poverty and increase transparency, and on scholarships and universities around the world" totaled $12 billion.[18] He influenced the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s,[19] and provided one of Europe's largest higher education endowments to the Central European University in his Hungarian hometown.[20] His extensive funding of political causes has made him a "bugaboo of European nationalists".[21] Numerous American conservatives have promoted false claims that characterize Soros as a singularly dangerous "puppetmaster" behind a variety of alleged global plots, with The New York Times reporting that by 2018 these claims had "moved from the fringes to the mainstream" of Republican politics.[27]
Contents
1
Early life and education
2
Investment career
2.1
Early business experience
2.2
Singer and Friedlander
2.3
F. M. Mayer
2.4
Wertheim and Co
2.5
Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder
2.6
Soros Fund Management
2.6.1
1992-pound short
2.6.2
Société Générale insider trade
3
Personal life
4
Political involvement
4.1
Central and Eastern Europe
4.2
Africa
4.3
Support of separatist movements
4.4
Drug policy reform
4.5
Death and dying
5
Conspiracy theories and threats
6
Attempted assassination
7
Political and economic views
7.1
Reflexivity, financial markets, and economic theory
7.2
Reflexivity in politics
7.3
View of problems in the free market system
7.3.1
Market predictions
7.4
Views on antisemitism and Israel
7.5
Views on the U.S.
7.6
Views on Europe
7.7
Views on relations between Europe and Africa
7.8
Views on China
7.9
Views on Russia and Ukraine
8
Wealth and philanthropy
9
Honours and awards
10
Publications and scholarship
10.1
Books authored or co-authored
10.2
Journalism
11
See also
12
Notes
13
References
14
Further reading
14.1
Biographies
14.2
Journalism
14.3
Scholarly perspectives
15
External links
Early life and education
Soros was born in Budapest in the Kingdom of Hungary to a prosperous non-observant Jewish family, who, like many upper-middle class Hungarian Jews at the time, were uncomfortable with their roots. Soros has wryly described his home as a Jewish antisemitic home.[28] His mother Erzsébet (also known as Elizabeth) came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop. His father Tivadar (also known as Teodoro Ŝvarc) was a lawyer[29] and a well-known Esperanto-speaker[30] editing a literary magazine ('Literatura Mondo') who had also been a prisoner of war during and after World War I until he escaped from Russia and rejoined his family in Budapest.[31][32] The two married in 1924. In 1936, Soros's family changed their name from the German-Jewish Schwartz to Soros, as protective camouflage in increasingly antisemitic Hungary.[33][34] Tivadar liked the new name because it is a palindrome and because of its meaning. In Hungarian, soros means "next in line," or "designated successor"; in Esperanto it means "will soar."[35][36][37]
Soros was 13 years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary.[38] The Nazis barred Jewish children from attending school, and Soros and the other schoolchildren were made to report to the Judenrat ("Jewish Council"), which had been established during the occupation. Soros later described this time to writer Michael Lewis: "The Jewish Council asked the little kids to hand out the deportation notices. I was told to go to the Jewish Council. And there I was given these small slips of paper ... I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it. This was a list of Hungarian Jewish lawyers. He said, 'You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported'."[39][40]
Soros did not return to that job; his family survived the war by purchasing documents to say that they were Christians. Later that year at age 14, Soros posed as the Christian godson of an official of the collaborationist Hungarian government's Ministry of Agriculture, who himself had a Jewish wife in hiding. On one occasion, rather than leave the 14-year-old alone, the official took Soros with him while inventorizing a Jewish family's confiscated estate. Tivadar 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.[41][42] In 1945, Soros survived the Siege of Budapest, in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city.
In 1947, Soros immigrated to England and became a student at the London School of Economics.[43] While a student of the philosopher Karl Popper, Soros worked as a railway porter and as a waiter, and once received £40 from a Quaker charity.[44] Soros would sometimes stand at Speakers' Corner lecturing about the virtues of internationalism in Esperanto, which he had learned from his father.[45]
Soros took a Bachelor of Science in philosophy in 1951, and a Master of Science in philosophy in 1954, both from the London School of Economics.[46]
Investment career
Early business experience
In a discussion at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in 2006, Alvin Shuster, former foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, asked Soros, "How does one go from an immigrant to a financier? ... When did you realize that you knew how to make money?" Soros replied, "Well, I had a variety of jobs and I ended up selling fancy goods on the seaside, souvenir shops, and I thought, that's really not what I was cut out to do. So, I wrote to every managing director in every merchant bank in London, got just one or two replies, and eventually that's how I got a job in a merchant bank."[47]
Singer and Friedlander
In 1954, Soros began his financial career at the merchant bank Singer & Friedlander of London. He worked as a clerk and later moved to the arbitrage department. A fellow employee, Robert Mayer, suggested he apply at his father's brokerage house, F.M. Mayer of New York.[48]
F. M. Mayer
In 1956, Soros moved to New York City, where he worked as an arbitrage trader for F. M. Mayer (1956–59). He specialized in European stocks, which were becoming popular with U.S. institutional investors following the formation of the Coal and Steel Community, which later became the Common Market.[49]
Wertheim and Co
In 1959, after three years at F. M. Mayer, Soros moved to Wertheim & Co.. He planned to stay for five years, enough time to save $500,000, after which he intended to return to England to study philosophy.[50] He worked as an analyst of European securities until 1963.
During this period, Soros developed the theory of reflexivity based on the ideas of his tutor at the London School of Economics, Karl Popper. Reflexivity posits that market values are often driven by the fallible ideas of participants, not only by the economic fundamentals of the situation. Ideas and events influence each other in reflexive feedback loops. Soros argued that this process leads to markets having procyclical "virtuous" or "vicious" cycles of boom and bust, in contrast to the equilibrium predictions of more standard neoclassical economics.[51][52]
Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder
From 1963 to 1973, Soros's experience as a vice president at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder resulted in little enthusiasm for the job; business was slack following the introduction of the Interest Equalization Tax, which undermined the viability of Soros's European trading. He spent the years from 1963 to 1966 with his main focus on the revision of his philosophy dissertation. In 1966 he started a fund with $100,000 of the firm's money to experiment with his trading strategies. However, he was primarily motivated by a desire to assert himself as an investor to profit from his reflexivity insights.[citation needed]
In 1969, Soros set up the Double Eagle hedge fund with $4m of investors' capital including $250,000 of his own money.[53] It was based in Curaçao, Dutch Antilles.[54] Double Eagle itself was an offshoot of Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder's First Eagle fund established by Soros and that firm's chairman Henry H. Arnhold in 1967.[55] [56]
In 1973, the Double Eagle Fund had $12 million and formed the basis of the Soros Fund. George Soros and Jim Rogers received returns on their share of capital and 20 percent of the profits each year.[49]
Soros Fund Management
In 1970, Soros founded Soros Fund Management and became its chairman. Among those who held senior positions there at various times were Jim Rogers, Stanley Druckenmiller, Mark Schwartz, Keith Anderson, and Soros's two sons.[57][58][59]
In 1973, due to perceived conflicts of interest limiting his ability to run the two funds, Soros resigned from the management of the Double Eagle Fund. He then established the Soros Fund and gave investors in the Double Eagle Fund the option of transferring to that or staying with Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder.
It was later renamed as the Quantum Fund, named after the physical theory of quantum mechanics. By that time the value of the fund had grown to $12m, only a small proportion of which was Soros's own money. He and Jim Rogers reinvested their returns from the fund, and also a large part of their 20% performance fees, thereby expanding their stake.[48]
By 1981, the fund had grown to $400m, and then a 22% loss in that year and substantial redemptions by some of the investors reduced it to $200m.[60]
In July 2011, Soros announced that he had returned funds from outside investors' money (valued at $1 billion) and instead invested funds from his $24.5 billion family fortune, due to changes in U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure rules, which he felt would compromise his duties of confidentiality to his investors. The fund had at that time averaged over 20% per year compound returns.[61]
In 2013, the Quantum Fund made $5.5 billion, making it again the most successful hedge fund in history. Since its inception in 1973, the fund has generated $40 billion.[62]
The fund announced in 2015 that it would inject $300 million to help finance the expansion of Fen Hotels, an Argentine hotel company. The funds will develop 5,000 rooms over the next three years throughout various Latin American countries.[63]
1992-pound short
Soros had been building a huge short position in pounds sterling for months leading up to September 1992. Soros had recognized the unfavorable position of the United Kingdom in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. For Soros, the rate at which the United Kingdom was brought into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was too high, their inflation was also much too high (triple the German rate), and British interest rates were hurting their asset prices.[64]
By September 16, 1992, the day of Black Wednesday, Soros's fund had sold short more than $10 billion in pounds,[57] profiting from the UK government's reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or float its currency.
Finally, the UK withdrew from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, devaluing the pound. Soros's profit on the bet was estimated at over $1 billion.[65] He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England".[66] The estimated cost of Black Wednesday to the UK Treasury was £3.4 billion.[67]
On October 26, 1992, The New York Times quoted Soros as saying: "Our total position by Black Wednesday had to be worth almost $10 billion. We planned to sell more than that. In fact, when Norman Lamont said just before the devaluation that he would borrow nearly $15 billion to defend sterling, we were amused because that was about how much we wanted to sell."
Stanley Druckenmiller, who traded under Soros, originally saw the weakness in the pound and stated: "[Soros's] contribution was pushing him to take a gigantic position."[68][69]
In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, the prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, accused Soros of using the wealth under his control to punish the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for welcoming Myanmar as a member. Following on a history of antisemitic remarks, Mahathir made specific reference to Soros's Jewish background ("It is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge"[70]) and implied Soros was orchestrating the crash as part of a larger Jewish conspiracy. Nine years later, in 2006, Mahathir met with Soros and afterward stated that he accepted that Soros had not been responsible for the crisis.[71] In 1998's The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered Soros explained his role in the crisis as follows:
The financial crisis that originated in Thailand in 1997 was particularly unnerving because of its scope and severity ... By the beginning of 1997, it was clear to Soros Fund Management that the discrepancy between the trade account and the capital account was becoming untenable. We sold short the Thai baht and the Malaysian ringgit early in 1997 with maturities ranging from six months to a year. (That is, we entered into contracts to deliver at future dates Thai baht and Malaysian ringgit that we did not currently hold.) Subsequently, Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia accused me of causing the crisis, a wholly unfounded accusation. We were not sellers of the currency during or several months before the crisis; on the contrary, we were buyers when the currencies began to decline—we were purchasing ringgits to realize the profits on our earlier speculation. (Much too soon, as it turned out. We left most of the potential gain on the table because we were afraid that Mahathir would impose capital controls. He did so, but much later.)[72]
In 1999, economist Paul Krugman was critical of Soros's effect on financial markets.
[N]obody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is 'Soroi'.[73]
In an interview regarding the late-2000s recession, Soros referred to it as the most serious crisis since the 1930s. According to Soros, market fundamentalism with its assumption that markets will correct themselves with no need for government intervention in financial affairs has been "some kind of an ideological excess." In Soros's view, the markets' moods—a "mood" of the markets being a prevailing bias or optimism/pessimism with which the markets look at reality—"actually can reinforce themselves so that there are these initially self-reinforcing but eventually unsustainable and self-defeating boom/bust sequences or bubbles."[74]
In reaction to the late-2000s recession, he founded the Institute for New Economic Thinking in October 2009. This is a think tank composed of international economic, business, and financial experts, who are mandated to investigate radical new approaches to organizing the international economic and financial system.
Société Générale insider trade
In 1988, Soros was contacted by a French financier named Georges Pébereau, who asked him to participate in an effort to assemble a group of investors to purchase a large number of shares in Société Générale, a leading French bank that was part of a privatization program (something instituted by the new government under Jacques Chirac).[75] Soros eventually decided against participating in the group effort, opting to personally move forward with his strategy of accumulating shares in four French companies: Société Générale, as well as Suez, Paribas, and the Compagnie Générale d'Électricité.
In 1989, the Commission des Opérations de Bourse (COB, the French stock exchange regulatory authority) conducted an investigation of whether Soros's transaction in Société Générale should be considered insider trading. Soros had received no information from the Société Générale and had no insider knowledge of the business, but he did possess knowledge that a group of investors was planning a takeover attempt. Initial investigations found Soros innocent, and no charges were brought forward.[76] However, the case was reopened a few years later, and the French Supreme Court confirmed the conviction on June 14, 2006,[77] although it reduced the penalty to €940,000.[77]
Soros denied any wrongdoing, saying news of the takeover was public knowledge[78] and it was documented that his intent to acquire shares of the company predated his own awareness of the takeover.[77] In December 2006, he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights on various grounds, including that the 14-year delay in bringing the case to trial precluded a fair hearing.[79] On the basis of Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, stating that no person may be punished for an act that was not a criminal offense at the time that it was committed, the court agreed to hear the appeal.[75] In October 2011, the court rejected his appeal in a 4–3 decision, saying that Soros had been aware of the risk of breaking insider trading laws.[80]
Personal life
Soros has been married three times and divorced twice. In 1960, he married Annaliese Witschak (born January 3, 1934). Annaliese was an ethnic German immigrant, who had been orphaned during the war. Although she was not Jewish, she was well-liked by Soros's parents as she had also experienced the privation and displacement brought about by World War II.[81] They divorced in 1983. They had three children:
Robert Daniel Soros (born 1963): The founder of the Central European University in Budapest, as well as a network of foundations in Eastern Europe. In 1992, he married Melissa Robin Schiff at the Temple Emanu-El in New York City. The Rabbi Dr. David Posner officiated the ceremony.[82]
Andrea Soros Colombel (born June 11, 1965): The founder and president of Trace Foundation, established in 1993 to promote the cultural continuity and sustainable development of Tibetan communities within China. She is also a founding partner and member of the board of directors of the Acumen Fund, a global venture fund that employs an entrepreneurial approach in addressing the problems of global poverty[83] She is married to Eric Colombel (born October 26, 1963).
Jonathan Tivadar Soros (born September 10, 1970): A hedge fund manager and political donor. In 2012, he co-founded Friends of Democracy, a super PAC dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics. In 1997, he married Jennifer Ann Allan (born November 26, 1969).[84]
In 1983, George Soros married Susan Weber (born April 15, 1955), 25 years his junior. They divorced in 2005. They have two children:
Alexander Soros (born 1985): Alexander has gained prominence for his donations to social and political causes, focusing his philanthropic efforts on "progressive causes that might not have widespread support."[85] Alexander led the list of student political donors in the 2010 election cycle.[86]
Gregory James Soros (born 1988), artist
In 2008, Soros met his current wife, Tamiko M. Bolton, who was born October 18, 1971 and is 42 years his junior;[87] he married her on September 21, 2013.[88] Bolton is the daughter of a Japanese-American nurse and a retired naval commander, Robert J. Bolton (born October 18, 1946). She was raised in California, earned an MBA from the University of Miami, and runs an Internet-based dietary supplement and vitamin-sales company.[89]
Soros's older brother Paul Soros, a private investor and philanthropist, died on June 15, 2013.[90] Also an engineer, Paul headed Soros Associates and established the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for Young Americans.[91][92] He was married to Daisy Soros (née Schlenger), who, like her husband, was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant,[93] and with whom he had two sons, Peter and Jeffrey.[94] Peter Soros was married to the former Flora Fraser, a daughter of Lady Antonia Fraser and the late Sir Hugh Fraser and a stepdaughter of the late 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. Fraser and Soros separated in 2009.[95]
In 2005, Soros was a minority partner in a group that tried to buy the Washington Nationals, a Major League baseball team. Some Republican lawmakers suggested that they might move to revoke Major League Baseball's antitrust exemption if Soros bought the team.[96] In 2008, Soros's name was associated with AS Roma, an Italian association football team, but the club was not sold. Soros was a financial backer of Washington Soccer L.P., the group that owned the operating rights to Major League Soccer club D.C. United when the league was founded in 1995, but the group lost these rights in 2000.[97] On August 21, 2012, BBC reported SEC filings showing Soros acquired roughly a 1.9 percent stake in English football club Manchester United through the purchase of 3.1 million of the club's Class-A shares.[98]
Political involvement
Soros was not a large donor to U.S. political causes until the 2004 presidential election, but according to the Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2003–2004 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 Groups (tax-exempt groups under the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527). The groups aimed to defeat President George W. Bush. After Bush's reelection, Soros and other donors backed a new political fundraising group called Democracy Alliance, which supports progressive causes and the formation of a stronger progressive infrastructure in America.[99]
In August 2009, Soros donated $35 million to the state of New York to be earmarked for underprivileged children and given to parents who had benefit cards at the rate of $200 per child aged 3 through 17, with no limit as to the number of children that qualified. An additional $140 million was put into the fund by the state of New York from money they had received from the 2009 federal recovery act.[44]
Soros was an initial donor to the Center for American Progress, and he continues to support the organization through the Open Society Foundations.
In October 2011, a Reuters story, "Soros: Not a funder of Wall Street Protests," was published after several commentators pointed out errors in an earlier Reuters story headlined "Who's Behind the Wall St. Protests?" with a lede stating that the Occupy Wall Street movement "may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men [Soros]." Reuters's follow-up article also reported a Soros spokesman and Adbusters' co-founder Kalle Lasn both saying that Adbusters—the reputed catalyst for the first Occupy Wall Street protests—had never received any contributions from Soros, contrary to Reuters's earlier story that reported that "indirect financial links" existed between the two as late as 2010.[100][101]
On September 27, 2012, Soros announced that he was donating $1 million to the super PAC backing President Barack Obama's reelection Priorities USA Action.[102]
In October 2013, Soros donated $25,000 to Ready for Hillary, becoming a co-chairman of the super PAC's national finance committee.[103] In June 2015, he donated $1 million to the Super PAC Priorities USA Action, which supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. He donated $6 million to the PAC in December 2015 and $2.5 million in August 2016.[104]
Central and Eastern Europe
Protesters in Tbilisi with flag of the Democratic Republic of Georgia blocking the way from the Open Society Institute office, 2005
According to Waldemar A. Nielsen, an authority on American philanthropy,[105] "[Soros] has undertaken ... nothing less than to open up the once-closed communist societies of Eastern Europe to a free flow of ideas and scientific knowledge from the outside world."[106] From 1979, as an advocate of 'open societies', Soros financially supported dissidents including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union.[107] In 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary with a budget of $3 million.[108]
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Soros' funding has continued to play an important role in the former Soviet sphere. A 2017 study found that a grant program by George Soros which awarded funding to over 28,000 scientists in the former Soviet sphere shortly after the end of the Soviet Union "more than doubled publications on the margin, significantly induced scientists to remain in the science sector, and had long-lasting [beneficial] impacts."[109] His funding of pro-democratic programs in Georgia was considered by Georgian nationalists to be crucial to the success of the Rose Revolution, although Soros has said that his role has been "greatly exaggerated."[110] Alexander Lomaia, Secretary of the Georgian Security Council and former Minister of Education and Science, is a former Executive Director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros Foundation), overseeing a staff of 50 and a budget of $2.5 million.[111]
Former Georgian foreign minister Salomé Zourabichvili wrote that institutions like the Soros Foundation were the cradle of democratization and that all the NGOs that gravitated around the Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. She opines that after the revolution the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.[112]
Some Soros-backed pro-democracy initiatives have been banned in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.[113] Ercis Kurtulus, head of the Social Transparency Movement Association (TSHD) in Turkey, said in an interview that "Soros carried out his will in Ukraine and Georgia by using these NGOs ... Last year Russia passed a special law prohibiting NGOs from taking money from foreigners. I think this should be banned in Turkey as well."[114] In 1997, Soros closed his foundation in Belarus after it was fined $3 million by the government for "tax and currency violations." According to The New York Times, the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has been widely criticized in the West and in Russia for his efforts to control the Belarus Soros Foundation and other independent NGOs and to suppress civil and human rights. Soros called the fines part of a campaign to "destroy independent society."[115]
In June 2009, Soros donated $100 million to Central Europe and Eastern Europe to counter the impact of the economic crisis on the poor, voluntary groups and non-government organisations.[116]
Since 2012 the Hungarian Fidesz government labelled George Soros as enemy of the state due to his humanitarian and political involvement in the European refugee crisis. The government has attacked OSF, the international civil support foundation created by George Soros, and tried to revoke the licence of Central European University (Budapest) (which failed mostly due to significant public outrage[117]). In response Soros called the government "a mafia state".[118]
As the 2018 election period started the government introduced public posters with the photo of Soros,[119] to create hostility in the general public towards him, using statements such as "Soros wants millions of migrants to live in Hungary", and "Soros wants to dismantle the border fence". The government also prepared a three-part law plan called "Stop Soros package" (which followed other various law changes[120] in the same year which hindered workings of several international NGOs in Hungary), which would include various steps against NGOs doing volunteer work related to the refugee crisis. Soros left most of these attacks without comments apart from a few short statements about the invalidity of the accusations.[citation needed]
Anti George Soros sentiment graffiti in Resen, Macedonia (2018). It reads: #Stop Soros #I will profit
In March 2017, six US senators sent a letter to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson[121] asking that he look into several grants the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have given to groups funded by "left-wing" Soros. According to the Heritage Foundation, the letter expressed specific concern about Soros' influence on Macedonian politics, a concern which has also been expressed by members of the conservative Macedonian government.[122] In the same context, Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State and USAID compelling them to release records regarding $5 million transferred from USAID to Soros' Open Society branch in Macedonia. The suit alleges that the money was deliberately used to destabilize the Macedonian government.[123]
In January 2017, the "Stop Operation Soros" (SOS) initiative was launched in Macedonia. SOS seeks to present "questions and answers about the way Soros operates worldwide" and invites citizens to contribute to the research. In a press conference held during the same month, Nenad Mircevski, one of the founders of the initiative, stated that SOS would work towards the "de-Soros-ization" of Macedonia.[124][125]
On May 16, 2018, Soros' Open Society Foundations announced they will move its office from Budapest to Berlin, blaming the move on an "increasingly repressive" environment in Hungary.[126][127][128]
Africa
The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa is a Soros-affiliated organization.[129] Its director for Zimbabwe is Godfrey Kanyenze, who also directs the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), which was the main force behind the founding of the Movement for Democratic Change, the principal indigenous organization promoting regime change in Zimbabwe.[citation needed]
Support of separatist movements
In November 2005, Soros said: "My personal opinion is there's no alternative but to give Kosovo independence."[130] Soros has helped fund the non-profit group called Independent Diplomat.[131] It represented Kosovo, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (under military occupation by Turkey since 1974),[132] Somaliland and the Polisario Front of Western Sahara.[131]
Drug policy reform
Soros has funded worldwide efforts to promote drug policy reform. In 2008, Soros donated $400,000 to help fund a successful ballot measure in Massachusetts known as the Massachusetts Sensible Marijuana Policy Initiative which decriminalized possession of less than 1 oz (28g) of marijuana in the state. Soros has also funded similar measures in California, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada and Maine.[133] Among the drug decriminalization groups that have received funding from Soros are the Lindesmith Center and Drug Policy Foundation.[134] Soros donated $1.4 million to publicity efforts to support California's Proposition 5 in 2008, a failed ballot measure that would have expanded drug rehabilitation programs as alternatives to prison for persons convicted of non-violent drug-related offenses.[135]
In October 2010, Soros donated $1 million to support California's Proposition 19.[136]
According to remarks in an interview in October 2009, it is Soros' opinion that marijuana is less addictive but not appropriate for use by children and students. He himself has not used marijuana for years.[137] Soros has been a major financier of the Drug Policy Alliance – an organization that promotes cannabis legalization – with roughly $4 million in annual contributions from one of his foundations.[138]
Death and dying
The Project on Death in America, active from 1994 to 2003,[139] was one of the Open Society Institute's projects, which sought to "understand and transform the culture and experience of dying and bereavement."[140] In 1994, Soros delivered a speech in which he reported that he had offered to help his mother, a member of the right-to-die advocacy organization Hemlock Society, commit suicide.[141] In the same speech, he also endorsed the Oregon Death with Dignity Act,[142] proceeding to help fund its advertising campaign.[143]
Conspiracy theories and threats
Soros' philanthropy and support for progressive causes has made him the object of a large number of conspiracy theories, most of them originating from the political right.[144][145] Veronika Bondarenko, writing for Business Insider said that "For two decades, some have seen Soros as a kind of puppet master secretly controlling the global economy and politics."[146] The New York Times describes the allegations as moving "from the dark corners of the internet and talk radio" to "the very center of the political debate" by 2018.[147]
Soros has become a magnet for such theories, with opponents claiming that he is behind such diverse events as the 2017 Women's March, the fact-checking website Snopes, the gun-control activism engaged in by the survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting,[148][149][150] the October 2018 immigrant caravans, and the protests against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.[147][151]
Conservatives, meanwhile, picked up on the thread in the late 2000s, spearheaded by Fox News. Bill O'Reilly gave an almost ten-minute monologue on Soros in 2007, calling him an "extremist" and claiming he was "off-the-charts dangerous".[149] Breitbart News, according to the London Times journalist, David Aaronovitch, in promoting East European nationalism, has regularly published articles blaming Soros for anything of which it disapproves.[152]
Soros' opposition to Brexit (in the United Kingdom) led to a front page on the British Conservative supporting newspaper, The Daily Telegraph in February 2018, which was accused of antisemitism for claiming he was involved in a supposed "secret plot" for the country's voters to reverse their decision to leave the European Union.[153] While the Telegraph did not mention Soros is Jewish, his opposition to Britain leaving the European Union had been reported elsewhere in less conspiratorial terms.[154] Stephen Pollard, editor of The Jewish Chronicle, said on Twitter: "The point is that language matters so much and this is exactly the language being used by antisemites here and abroad".[155][156]
After being ousted from office in the wake of the Panama Papers scandal of 2016, Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson accused Soros of having bankrolled a conspiracy to remove him from power.[157][158] It was later pointed out that Soros himself had also been implicated in the Panama Papers, casting doubt on the prime minister's theory.[159]
Right-wing figures such as Alex Jones, Roseanne Barr, Donald Trump Jr., James Woods, Dinesh D'Souza, and Louie Gohmert have spread a false conspiracy theory, which has been described as anti-Semitic, that Soros was a Nazi collaborator who turned in other Jews and stole their property.[160][161][162][163] Soros was a child during World War II who had to hide from the Hungarian government during Nazi occupation.[170]
In October 2018, Soros was accused of funding a Central American migrant caravan heading toward America.[171][172][173] The theory that Soros was somehow causing Central American migration at the southern US border apparently dates back to late March 2018, however.[174] The October 2018 strain of the theory has been described to combine anti-semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment and "the specter of powerful foreign agents controlling major world events in pursuit of a hidden agenda", connecting Soros and other wealthy individuals of Jewish faith or background to the October caravan.[174] Both Cesar Sayoc, the perpetrator of the October 2018 attempted bombings of prominent Democrats, and Robert Bowers, the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, referred to this conspiracy theory on social media before their crimes.[175][176]
In November 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan denounced Soros while speaking about Turkey's political purges, saying: "The person (Kavala) who financed terrorists during the Gezi incidents is already in prison. And who is behind him? The famous Hungarian Jew Soros. This is a man who assigns people to divide nations and shatter them."[177]
Attempted assassination
A pipe bomb was placed in the mailbox at Soros's Katonah, New York home on October 22, 2018, as part of the October 2018 United States mail bombing attempts. The package was discovered by a caretaker,[178] who removed it and notified authorities. It was photographed and exploded by the FBI, which launched an investigation.[179][180] For several days afterward, similar bombs were mailed to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and several other Democrats and liberals.[181]
On October 26, 2018, Cesar Sayoc was arrested in Aventura, Florida, on suspicion of mailing the bombs.[182]
Political and economic views
External video
George Soros
The Lecture Series: Introduction, 2:56
General Theory of Reflexivity, 52:00
Financial Markets, 43:59
Open Society, 43:39
Capitalism vs. Open Society, 47:38 all by the Open Society Foundations
Reflexivity, financial markets, and economic theory
Soros's writings focus heavily on the concept of reflexivity, where the biases of individuals enter into market transactions, potentially changing the fundamentals of the economy. Soros argues that different principles apply in markets depending on whether they are in a "near to equilibrium" or a "far from equilibrium" state. He argues that, when markets are rising or falling rapidly, they are typically marked by disequilibrium rather than equilibrium, and that the conventional economic theory of the market (the "efficient market hypothesis") does not apply in these situations. Soros has popularized the concepts of dynamic disequilibrium, static disequilibrium, and near-equilibrium conditions.[52] He has stated that his own financial success has been attributable to the edge accorded by his understanding of the action of the reflexive effect. Reflexivity is based on three main ideas:[52]
Reflexivity is best observed under special conditions where investor bias grows and spreads throughout the investment arena. Examples of factors that may give rise to this bias include (a) equity leveraging or (b) the trend-following habits of speculators.
Reflexivity appears intermittently since it is most likely to be revealed under certain conditions; i.e., the character of the equilibrium process is best considered in terms of probabilities.
Investors' observation of and participation in the capital markets may at times influence valuations and fundamental conditions or outcomes.
A recent example of reflexivity in modern financial markets is that of the debt and equity of housing markets.[52] Lenders began to make more money available to more people in the 1990s to buy houses. More people bought houses with this larger amount of money, thus increasing the prices of these houses. Lenders looked at their balance sheets which not only showed that they had made more loans, but that the collaterals backing the loans – the value of the houses – had gone up (because more money was chasing the same amount of housing, relatively). Thus they lent out more money because their balance sheets looked good, and prices rose higher still.
This was further amplified by public policy. In the US, home loans were guaranteed by the Federal government. Many national governments saw home ownership as a positive outcome and so introduced grants for first-time home buyers and other financial subsidies, such as the exemption of a primary residence from capital gains taxation. These further encouraged house purchases, leading to further price rises and further relaxation of lending standards.
The concept of reflexivity attempts to explain why markets moving from one equilibrium state to another tend to overshoot or undershoot. Soros's theories were originally dismissed by economists,[183] but have received more attention after the 2008 crash including becoming the focus of an issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology.[184]
The notion of reflexivity provides an explanation of the theories of Complexity economics, as developed at the Santa Fe Institute, although Soros had not publicised his views at the time the discipline was originally developed there in the 1980s.[185][186][187][188]
Reflexivity in politics
Although the primary manifestation of the reflexive process that Soros discusses is its effects in the financial markets, he has also explored its effects in politics. He has stated that whereas the greatest threats to the "Open Society" in the past were from Communism and Fascism (as discussed in The Open Society and Its Enemies by his mentor Karl Popper), the largest current threat is from market fundamentalism.
He has suggested that the contemporary domination of world politics and world trade by the United States is a reflexive phenomenon, insofar as the success of military and financial coercion feeds back to encourage increasingly intense applications of the same policies to the point where they will eventually become unsustainable.[189]
View of problems in the free market system
Soros argues that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries. He blames many of the world's problems on the failures inherent in what he characterizes as market fundamentalism.[190]
Market predictions
Soros's book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets (May 2008), described a "superbubble" that had built up over the past 25 years and was ready to collapse. This was the third in a series of books he has written that have predicted disaster. As he states:
I have a record of crying wolf ... I did it first in The Alchemy of Finance (in 1987), then in The Crisis of Global Capitalism (in 1998), and now in this book. So it's three books predicting disaster. [After] the boy cried wolf three times ... the wolf really came.[191]
He ascribes his own success to being able to recognize when his predictions are wrong.
I'm only rich because I know when I'm wrong ... I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes. I very often used to get backaches due to the fact that I was wrong. Whenever you are wrong you have to fight or [take] flight. When [I] make the decision, the backache goes away.[191]
In February 2009, Soros said the world financial system had in effect disintegrated, adding that there was no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.[192] "We witnessed the collapse of the financial system ... It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."
In January 2016, at an economic forum in Sri Lanka, Soros predicted a financial crisis akin to 2008 based on the state of the global currency, stock and commodity markets as well as the sinking Chinese yuan.
China has a major adjustment problem. I would say it amounts to a crisis. When I look at the financial markets there is a serious challenge which reminds me of the crisis we had in 2008.[193][194]
Views on antisemitism and Israel
When asked about what he thought about Israel, in The New Yorker, Soros replied: "I don't deny the Jews to a right to a national existence – but I don't want anything to do with it."[195] According to hacked emails released in 2016, Soros's Open Society Foundation has a self-described objective of "challenging Israel's racist and anti-democratic policies" in international forums, in part by questioning Israel's reputation as a democracy.[196] He has funded NGOs which have been actively critical of Israeli policies[197][198][199] including groups that campaign for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.[197]
Speaking before a 2003 conference of the Jewish Funders Network, Soros said that the administrations of George W. Bush in the U.S. and Ariel Sharon in Israel, and even the unintended consequences of some of his own actions, were partially contributing to a new European antisemitism. Soros, citing accusations that he was one of the "Jewish financiers" who, in antisemitic terms, "ruled the world by proxy", suggested that if we change the direction of those policies, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League later said that Soros's comments held a simplistic view, were counterproductive, biased and a bigoted perception of what's out there, and "blamed the victim" when holding Jews responsible for antisemitism. Jewish philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, who arranged for Soros's appearance at the conference, clarified, "George Soros does not think Jews should be hated any more than they deserve to be."[200] Soros has also said that Jews can overcome antisemitism by "giv[ing] up on the tribalness".[201]
In a subsequent article for The New York Review of Books, Soros emphasized that
I do not subscribe to the myths propagated by enemies of Israel and I am not blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism predates the birth of Israel. Neither Israel's policies nor the critics of those policies should be held responsible for anti-Semitism. At the same time, I do believe that attitudes toward Israel are influenced by Israel's policies, and attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby's success in suppressing divergent views.[202]
In 2017, Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz filed a $10 million lawsuit against Soros, alleging that Soros had influenced the government of Guinea to freeze Steinmetz's company BSG Resources out of iron ore mining contracts in the African country due to "long-standing animus toward the state of Israel".[203][204][205] Steinmetz claims that Soros engaged in a "smear" campaign against him and his companies and blames Soros for scrutiny of him by American, Israeli, Swiss, and Guinean authorities.[206] Soros called Steinmetz's suit "frivolous and entirely false" and said that it was "a desperate PR stunt meant to deflect attention from BSGR's mounting legal problems across multiple jurisdictions".[207]
During an award ceremony for Imre Kertész, Soros said that the victims of violence and abuse were becoming "perpetrators of violence", suggesting that this model explained Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians, which led to walkouts and Soros being booed.[208]
In July 2017, in Hungary a billboard campaign backed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán which was considered to be anti-semitic by the country's Jewish groups vilified Soros as an enemy of the state using the slogan "Let's not allow Soros to have the last laugh".[209] The campaign was estimated to have cost 5.7bn forints (then US$21 million).[210] According to the Israeli ambassador the campaign "evokes sad memories but also sows hatred and fear", a reference to Hungary's role in the deportation of 500,000 Jews during the Holocaust.[211] Lydia Gall of Human Rights Watch asserted that it was reminiscent of Nazi posters during the Second World War featuring "'the laughing Jew'".[212] Orbán and his government's representative said they had a "zero tolerance" of antisemitism explaining the posters were aiming to persuade voters Soros was a "national security risk".[209]
Hours later, in an apparent attempt to ally Israel with Hungary, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a "clarification", denouncing Soros, stating that he "continuously undermines Israel's democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself".[213]
Soros' son Alexander said in an interview that his father cares about Israel, and that he "would like to see Israel in Yitzhak Rabin's image. His views are more or less the common views in Meretz and in the Labor Party." According to Alexander, Soros supports a two-state solution. The younger Soros recounts that after his bar mitzvah in 1998, his father told him: "If you're serious about being Jewish, you might want to consider immigrating to Israel."[214]
Views on the U.S.
On November 11, 2003, in an interview with The Washington Post, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the "central focus of my life" and "a matter of life and death". He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat Bush "if someone guaranteed it".[215][216] Soros gave $3 million to the Center for American Progress, $2.5 million to MoveOn.org, and $20 million[217] to America Coming Together. These groups worked to support Democrats in the 2004 election. On September 28, 2004, he dedicated more money to the campaign and kicked off his own multistate tour with a speech: Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush[218] delivered at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The online transcript to this speech received many hits after Dick Cheney accidentally referred to FactCheck.org as "factcheck.com" in the vice presidential debate, causing the owner of that domain to redirect all traffic to Soros's site.[219]
External video
Booknotes interview with Soros on The Bubble of American Supremacy, February 29, 2004, C-SPAN
His 2003 book, The Bubble of American Supremacy[220], was a forthright critique of the Bush administration's "War on Terror" as misconceived and counterproductive, and a polemic against the re-election of Bush. He explains the title in the closing chapter by pointing out the parallels in this political context with the self-reinforcing reflexive processes that generate bubbles in stock prices.
When Soros was asked in 2006 about his statement in The Age of Fallibility that "the main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States", he responded that "it happens to coincide with the prevailing opinion in the world. And I think that's rather shocking for Americans to hear. The United States sets the agenda for the world. And the rest of the world has to respond to that agenda. By declaring a 'war on terror' after September 11, we set the wrong agenda for the world ... When you wage war, you inevitably create innocent victims."[221]
Soros described Donald Trump as a con man.[222] Soros expects Trump to fail because Soros believes Trump's ideas are self-contradictory. Soros said in 2017 he believed Trump was preparing for a trade war and expected financial markets to do badly.[223]
Views on Europe
In October 2011, Soros drafted an open letter entitled "As concerned Europeans we urge Eurozone leaders to unite",[224] in which he calls for a stronger economic government for Europe using federal means (Common EU treasury, common fiscal supervision, etc.) and warns against the danger of nationalistic solutions to the economic crisis. The letter was co-signed by Javier Solana, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Andrew Duff, Emma Bonino, Massimo D'Alema, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga.
Soros criticized Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his handling of the European migrant crisis in 2015: "His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle."[225]
Soros expects that Brexit will fail and the Premiership of Theresa May will last only a short time.[223] Soros is opposed to Brexit and has donated £400,000 to the anti-Brexit 'Best for Britain' group.[226] Soros also hosted a dinner for Conservative donors at his London home to encourage them to follow his lead. Soros's Open Society Foundations also donated a total of £303,000 to two pro-EU organizations, the European Movement UK and Scientists for EU, and a center-right think-tank, Bright Blue.[227]
In 2018, Soros has highlighted that Europe faces major challenges, in particular, that related to immigration, austerity, and nations leaving the political block.[228] He holds that Europe is facing an existential crisis, in view of the rise of populism, the refugee crisis and a growing rift between Europe and the United States.[229] Soros has also stated that "the euro has many unresolved problems" which "must not be allowed to destroy the European Union". He advocated replacing the notion of a multi-speed Europe by the aim of a "multi-track Europe" that would allow member states a wider variety of choices.[230]
Views on relations between Europe and Africa
In view of the possibility of a further increase of the number of refugees from Africa to Europe, Soros proposes that the European Union devise a Marshall Plan for Africa (see Marshall Plan), fostering education and employment in Africa in order to reduce emigration.[228][230]
Views on China
Soros has expressed concern about the growth of Chinese economic and political power, saying, "China has risen very rapidly by looking out for its own interests ... They have now got to accept responsibility for world order and the interests of other people as well." Regarding the political gridlock in America, he said, "Today, China has not only a more vigorous economy but actually a better functioning government than the United States."[231] In July 2015, Soros stated that a "strategic partnership between the US and China could prevent the evolution of two power blocks that may be drawn into military conflict".[232] In January 2016, during an interview at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Soros stated that "[a] hard landing is practically unavoidable". Chinese state media responded by stating "Soros' challenge to the RMB and Hong Kong dollar are doomed to fail, without any doubt."[233]
In January 2019, Soros used his annual speech at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, to label Xi Jinping, the president of China, as the "most dangerous opponent of open societies", saying: "China is not the only authoritarian regime in the world but it is the wealthiest, strongest and technologically most advanced". He also urged the United States not to allow the Chinese technology companies Huawei and ZTE to dominate the 5G telecommunications market as this would present an "unacceptable security risk for the rest of the world".[234][235] Soros also criticized the newest form of China's Big Brother-like system of mass surveillance called the Social Credit System, saying it would give Xi, "total control" over the people of China."[236]
Views on Russia and Ukraine
In May 2014, Soros told CNN's Fareed Zakaria: "I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent from Russia. And the foundation has been functioning ever since and played an important part in events now."[237]
In January 2015, Soros said that "Europe needs to wake up and recognize that it is under attack from Russia." He also urged Western countries to expand economic sanctions against Russia for its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine.[238]
In January 2015, Soros called on the European Union to give $50 billion of bailout money to Ukraine.[239]
In July 2015, Soros stated that Putin's annexation of Crimea was a challenge to the "prevailing world order," specifically the European Union. He hypothesized that Putin wants to "destabilize all of Ukraine by precipitating a financial and political collapse for which he can disclaim responsibility, while avoiding occupation of a part of eastern Ukraine, which would then depend on Russia for economic support."[232] In November 2015, Russia banned the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the Open Society Institute (OSI)-- two pro-democracy charities founded by Soros—stating they posed a "threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation and the security of the state."[240][241] In January 2016, 53 books related to Soros's "Renewal of Humanitarian Education" program were withdrawn at the Vorkuta Mining and Economic College in the Komi Republic, with 427 additional books seized for shredding. A Russian intergovernmental letter released in December 2015 stated that Soros's charities were "forming a perverted perception of history and making ideological directives, alien to Russian ideology, popular". Most of these books were published with funds donated by Soros's charities.[242][243]
Wealth and philanthropy
Further information on George Soros's philanthropy: List of projects supported by George Soros
George Soros speaks to the LSE alumni society in Malaysia.
As of February 2017, Forbes magazine listed Soros as the 29th richest person in the world,[244] the world's richest hedge-fund manager, and 19th on its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans,[245] with a net worth estimated at $25.2 billion.[246] This was after Soros had lost almost $1 billion in the weeks after the election of Republican Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016.[247]
Soros has been active as a philanthropist since the 1970s, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa,[107] and began funding dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain.
Soros's philanthropic funding includes efforts to promote non-violent democratization in the post-Soviet states. These efforts, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, occur primarily through the Open Society Foundations (originally Open Society Institute or OSI) and national Soros Foundations, which sometimes go under other names (such as the Stefan Batory Foundation in Poland). As of 2003, PBS estimated that he had given away a total of $4 billion.[78] The OSI says it has spent about $500 million annually in recent years.
In 2003, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker wrote in the foreword of Soros's book The Alchemy of Finance:
George Soros has made his mark as an enormously successful speculator, wise enough to largely withdraw when still way ahead of the game. The bulk of his enormous winnings is now devoted to encouraging transitional and emerging nations to become "open societies", open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce but—more important—tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.[248]
Time magazine in 2007 cited two specific projects—$100 million toward Internet infrastructure for regional Russian universities, and $50 million for the Millennium Promise to eradicate extreme poverty in Africa—noting that Soros had given $742 million to projects in the U.S., and given away a total of more than $7 billion.[249]
Other notable projects have included aid to scientists and universities throughout central and eastern Europe, help to civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and Transparency International. Soros also pledged an endowment of €420 million to the Central European University (CEU). The Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and his microfinance bank Grameen Bank received support from the OSI.[citation needed]
According to National Review Online[250] the Open Society Institute gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Defense Committee of Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who has defended controversial, poor, and often unpopular defendants in court and was sentenced to 2
1
/
3
years in prison for "providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy" via a press conference for a client. An OSI spokeswoman said "it appeared to us at that time that there was a right-to-counsel issue worthy of our support" but claimed later requests for support were declined.[251]
In September 2006, Soros pledged $50 million to the Millennium Promise, led by economist Jeffrey Sachs to provide educational, agricultural, and medical aid to help villages in Africa enduring poverty. The New York Times termed this endeavor a "departure" for Soros whose philanthropic focus had been on fostering democracy and good government, but Soros noted that most poverty resulted from bad governance.[252]
Soros played a role in the peaceful transition from communism to democracy in Hungary (1984–89)[19] and provided a substantial endowment to Central European University in Budapest.[253] The Open Society Foundations has active programs in more than 60 countries around the world with total expenditures currently averaging approximately $600 million a year.[3][254]
On October 17, 2017, it was announced that Soros had transferred $18 billion to the Open Society Foundations.[255]
In October 2018, Soros donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation via the Wikimedia Endowment program.[256]
Honours and awards
Soros received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York), the University of Oxford in 1980, the Corvinus University of Budapest, and Yale University in 1991. He received the Yale International Center for Finance Award from the Yale School of Management in 2000[citation needed] as well as an honorary degree in economics from the University of Bologna in 1995.[257]
In 2008, he was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha's Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame along with Alfred Jones, Bruce Kovner, David Swensen, Jack Nash, James Simons, Julian Roberston, Kenneth Griffin, Leon Levy, Louis Bacon, Michael Steinhardt, Paul Tudor Jones, Seth Klarman and Steven A. Cohen.[258]
In January 2014, Soros was ranked number 1 in LCH Investments list of top 20 managers having posting gains of almost $42 billion since the launch of his Quantum Endowment Fund in 1973.[259]
In July 2017, Soros was elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy (HonFBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[260]
Soros was the Financial Times Person of the Year for 2018, with the FT describing him as a "a standard bearer for liberal democracy, an idea under siege from populists".[261]
In April 2019 Soros was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Courage.[262] In his acceptance address Soros said: "In my native Hungary, the government of [Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán has turned me into the super villain of an alleged plot to destroy the supposed Christian identity of the Hungarian nation... [I] donate the prize money associated with this award to the Hungarian Spectrum, an online English-language publication that provides daily updates on Hungarian politics. It renders an important service by exposing to the world [in English] what Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is telling his own people [in Hungarian]. It [Hungarian Spectrum] deserves to be better known and supported."[263]
Why is billionaire George Soros a bogeyman for the hard right?
7 September 2019
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He's a Jewish multi-billionaire philanthropist who has given away $32bn. Why does the hard right from America to Australia and from Hungary to Honduras believe George Soros is at the heart of a global conspiracy, asks the BBC's Mike Rudin.
One quiet Monday afternoon last October in leafy upstate New York, a large manila envelope was placed in the mailbox of an exclusive country mansion belonging to multi-billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
The package looked suspicious. The return address was misspelt as "FLORIDS" and the mail had already been delivered earlier that day. The police were called and soon the FBI was on the scene.
Inside the bubble-wrapped envelope was a photograph of Soros, marked with a red "X". Alongside it, a six-inch plastic pipe, a small clock, a battery, wiring and a black powder.
More than a dozen similar packages were sent to the homes of former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats.
None of the devices exploded. The FBI traced the bombs to a white van covered in pro-Trump and anti-Democrat stickers, parked in a supermarket car park in Florida.
Immediately the right-wing media claimed it was a "false-flag" operation intended to derail President Donald Trump and the Republican campaign, just two weeks before the crucial US mid-term elections.
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs tweeted: "Fake News - Fake Bombs. Who could possibly benefit by so much fakery?" Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh added: "Republicans just don't do this kind of thing."
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Morgan Finkelstein
Soon the internet was awash with allegations that the bomb plot was a hoax organised by Soros himself.
President Trump condemned the "despicable acts", but when a member of the audience at a White House reception shouted "Soros! Lock him up!" the president seemed amused.
Then a 56-year-old Florida man called Cesar Sayoc was arrested.
Conspiracy theories claimed he wasn't actually a Republican. But Luigi Marra, a former work colleague, told me how Sayoc used to deliver pizzas in his van plastered with pro-Trump stickers and argue with customers if they had Democratic posters at their homes.
"Everything for him was a conspiracy theory, everything. George Soros was the one behind everything, he was the one buying the whole Democratic Party, he was the epicentre of what is going wrong in the United States of America."
Sayoc's social media revealed more. On the day the pipe bomb was discovered at George Soros's house, Sayoc reposted a meme claiming, "The world is waking up to the horrors of George Soros."
Sayoc later pleaded guilty to 65 counts, including intent to kill or injure with explosives, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
So how did George Soros come to be regarded by so many as the evil mastermind at the heart of a global conspiracy?
Find out more
Watch Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind on BBC Two at 21:00 on Sunday 8 September
Viewers in the UK can catch up later online
In the UK, Soros is known as "the man who broke the Bank of England" in 1992. Along with other currency speculators, he borrowed pounds, and then sold them, helping to drive down the price of sterling on currency markets and ultimately forcing the UK to crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In the process he made $1bn.
The Hungarian emigre, who survived the Holocaust and fled the Communists, is thought to have made in total about $44bn through financial speculation. And he's used his fortune to fund thousands of education, health, human rights and democracy projects.
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Soros in Moscow in 1993
Established in 1979, his Open Society Foundations now operate in more than 120 countries around the world. But this bold philanthropy in support of liberal, democratic causes has increasingly made him the bogeyman of the right.
The first conspiracy theories about George Soros appeared in the early 1990s, but they really gained traction after he condemned the 2003 Iraq War and started donating millions of dollars to the US Democratic Party. Ever since, American right-wing commentators and politicians have gone after him with increasing fury and vitriol, and often with scant concern for the facts.
But it was Donald Trump's election victory that took the attacks on Soros to a new and dangerous level.
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White supremacists marching in Charlottesville
Eight months into Trump's presidency, in August 2017, neo-Nazis held a torchlit procession in Charlottesville, Virginia. Clashes with counter-protesters ended in tragedy, when a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Among US right-wingers it was soon claimed that the violence was orchestrated and financed by Soros, in order to tarnish the reputation of President Trump. And they said the key to the secret plot was a man called Brennan Gilmore, who filmed the car being driven into the counter-protesters. Right-wing radio host Alex Jones claimed Gilmore was paid $320,000 a year by Soros and was part of a deep-state coup to oust the president.
But any connection was extremely tenuous.
While it's true that Soros gave $500,000 to the political campaign of Tom Perriello - a Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia whom Gilmore had worked for - there's no evidence Soros or the Open Society directed or paid protesters at Charlottesville. Gilmore, who never received any money from Soros, is now suing Alex Jones and several others for defamation.
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Clashes in Charlottesville
Since then, the attacks on Soros have kept coming, and only intensified.
Last autumn thousands of migrants left Honduras bound for the USA, just a month before the mid-term elections that threatened to weaken Republican control of Congress.
Immediately the so-called migrant caravan was blamed on Soros. Fox News repeatedly broadcast claims that Soros wanted open borders and unrestricted immigration.
Jack Kingston, a former Republican Congressman, told me: "It is a very organised effort and somebody is behind this, somebody is paying for some of this and it would be typical of George Soros to get involved in that."
For his part, President Trump retweeted a video that claimed to show cash being handed out to people in Honduras to "storm the US border", with a suggestion that the cash might have come from Soros.
When asked outside the White House whether Soros was funding the migrant caravan, he replied: "I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of people say yes."
Cindy Jerezano, who travelled with the caravan from her home in Honduras to the US, told me that she was not offered any money and made her own decision to travel nearly 3,000 miles to San Diego.
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The migrant caravan crosses from Guatemala into Mexico
Cindy was supported, once she arrived in the US, by the Catholic Charities for the Diocese of San Diego. Nadine Toppozada, the charity's director of refugee and immigrant services, explained that their lawyers interviewed asylum seekers in great detail but had never heard Soros's name mentioned. Nor had they seen any evidence of Soros involvement.
What's more, the video President Trump retweeted quickly turned out to be flawed.
Within hours, journalists discovered the footage was not filmed in Honduras as originally claimed, but in the neighbouring country of Guatemala, and a closer look at the clip showed at least one of the supposed aid workers was armed.
The migrant caravan was filmed throughout its entire journey. Local charities were seen helping the migrants. But there is no evidence of Soros funding at any point.
On 27 October 2018, 11 days after the first conspiracy theory surfaced about the migrant caravan, and five days after the pipe bomb was delivered to Soros's house, a white man armed with an assault rifle and three handguns walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh. There he murdered 11 Jews.
It was the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in US history - and it was carried out by a man obsessed with George Soros.
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A vigil in memory of the 11 people who died is held at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh
The social media posts of the gunman, Robert Bowers, revealed he believed in a dark anti-Semitic conspiracy theory called "white genocide", with Soros as the mastermind.
The theory claims white people are being replaced by immigrants and will ultimately be eliminated. It explains the neo-Nazis' chant, "Jews will not replace us!" as they marched through Charlottesville.
Joel Finkelstein, director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, discovered one post where Bowers referred to Soros as "the Jew that funds white genocide and controls the press", and claimed that he pushed for gun control and open borders.
Finkelstein, who has received Open Society funding to investigate what he believes is a growing threat, concludes that white supremacists like Bowers see Soros as a Jewish mastermind pulling the strings. "These violent actors are justifying their violence by pointing to Soros as a supreme form of evil," he says.
'I stabbed someone to get into a white supremacy gang'
When a right-wing activist met a left-wing anti-fascist
Is there a growing far-right threat online?
The vilification of George Soros has spread far beyond the US, to Armenia, Australia, Honduras, the Philippines, Russia and many other countries.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Soros of being at the heart of a Jewish conspiracy to "divide" and "shatter" Turkey and other nations.
In Italy, former deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini accused him of wanting to fill the country with migrants because "he likes slaves".
The leader of the UK's Brexit Party, Nigel Farage, has claimed Soros is "actively encouraging people… to flood Europe" and "in many ways is the biggest danger to the entire Western World".
But one country, and one government, has gone further than any other to attack Soros. It is his birthplace, Hungary, where he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding free school meals, human rights projects and even a new university.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his populist nationalist government claim that Soros has a secret plot to flood Hungary with migrants and destroy their nation.
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A billboard tells Hungarians not to let Soros "have the last laugh"
Leonard Benardo, vice-president of the Open Society Foundations, protests that this is an outright lie: "The allegation is false. Neither George Soros nor the Open Society Foundations are proponents of open borders."
That hasn't stopped the Hungarian government, which has spent 100m euros on a media campaign warning voters not to let Soros "have the last laugh" and introduced what it calls "Stop Soros" laws, criminalising help for illegal immigrants and taxing support for organisations "promoting migration".
"There's a lot of money going into the Soros empire, billions of dollars for the past couple of decades and years," government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told me. "Now that's a lot of money, and nobody can be as naïve as to believe that that money goes without weight and goes without any intention."
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Hungary erected a razorwire border fence in September 2015, halting the entry of migrants
As Michael Ignatieff, the president and rector of the Central European University that Soros founded, puts it: "The Orban government has decided to make Mr Soros public enemy number one".
So how did this happen?
The answer lies in upstate New York.
In 2013, when the Hungarian leader needed advice on getting re-elected, he approached a legendary political consultant, called Arthur Finkelstein (no relation of Joel), who used to work in a small office above a hairdresser's in Irvington, just 20 miles down the road from Soros's country mansion.
Arthur Finkelstein, who died in 2017, worked for Donald Trump, George Bush senior, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and is renowned for making "liberal" a dirty word in politics.
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C-Span
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Arthur Finkelstein
Finkelstein created a new style of politics dubbed "Finkel Think", says Hannes Grassegger, a reporter for the Swiss publication, Das Magazin.
"Arthur Finkelstein always said, 'You don't go against the Taliban, you go against Osama Bin Laden.' So it's about personalisation, picking the perfect enemy and then [you] go full on against that person, so that people are actually scared of your opponent. And never talk about your own candidate's policies, they don't matter at all."
Finkelstein realised the best way to get Orban elected was to find a new enemy. He suggested Soros, and it was a perfect choice, Grassegger says. "The very right hated him because he was Jewish, people at the very left hated him because he was a capitalist."
The irony is, Arthur Finkelstein was himself a Jew. "This Jewish gentleman creates this Jewish monster," Grassegger says.
The Hungarian Government denies they needed anyone to "invent" Soros. In a statement it said: "George Soros invented himself as a political actor as long as two decades ago. George Soros's network of institutions exercises a great deal of power without a mandate coming from the people."
But Orban seems to have implemented Finkelstein's advice to the letter and gone even further.
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The Conspiracy Files: Why did Hungary’s PM turn on George Soros?
In a speech weeks before the 2018 general election, Orban rounded on Soros and appeared to revive anti-Semitic stereotypes.
"We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding. Not straightforward but crafty. Not honest but unprincipled. Not national but international. Does not believe in working but speculates with money. Does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world," he said.
Viktor Orban won by a landslide. After the election, the crackdown on Soros-funded organisations intensified. Last May the Open Society closed its office in Hungary.
Michael Ignatieff has battled to keep the Central European University open in Budapest. He is determined to counter what he claims is dangerous propaganda in a country in which more than half a million Jewish Hungarians were exterminated by the Nazis in just two months in 1944.
Ignatieff says the anti-Soros campaign "is a faithful reprise of every single trope of anti-Semitic hatred from the 1930s... The whole thing is a complete fantasy. This is the politics of the 21st Century, if you haven't got an enemy invent one as fast as you can, make him look as powerful as possible and bingo - you mobilise your base and win elections with it."
Prof Deborah Lipstadt, who won a famous legal battle to expose a Holocaust denier in the British courts, is deeply uneasy too.
"It terrifies me that this kind of rhetoric, which used to be heard in beer halls and dark corners, is being spoken by politicians, by leaders of countries, the deputy prime minister of Italy, the prime minister of Hungary. That this kind of language is being used is shocking."
George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. He survived the occupation of Budapest and left communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. While a student at LSE, Mr. Soros became familiar with the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, who had a profound influence on his thinking and later on his professional and philanthropic activities. The financier. In 1956 Mr. Soros moved to the United States, where he began to accumulate a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. Today he is Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC.
George Soros Biography
(1930–)
Updated:Oct 3, 2019Original:Jan 26, 2018
George Soros is a self-made billionaire known for his investment savvy and his vast body of philanthropic work.
Who Is George Soros?
Investor and philanthropist George Soros survived Nazi occupation followed by Communist-rule in Hungary in the mid-1940s and emigrated to London. There he studied economics and after earning his degree, moved to New York City in 1956, where he entered a life of finance. He began his renowned philanthropic efforts in 1979, and as of 2012, his lifetime giving amounted to more than $7 billion via his Open Society Foundations.
Early Years
George Soros was born Gyorgy Schwartz in Budapest, Hungary, on August 12, 1930, to parents Tividar and Erzebat Schwartz. To avoid growing anti-Semite persecution, his father changed their surname to Soros in 1936. As a teenager, he survived the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary in 1944.
After WWII ended, Soros emigrated from then-Communist-dominated Hungary in 1947 and made his way to England. At the London School of Economics, Soros began studying Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which explores the philosophy of science and serves as Popper’s critique of totalitarianism. The essential lesson the book imparted to Soros was that no ideology owns the truth and that societies can flourish only when they operate freely and openly and maintain respect for individual rights—thoughts that would deeply influence Soros for the rest of his life.
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Investment Success
Soros graduated in 1952, and in September 1956, he sailed to New York and took a job at Wall Street brokerage firm F.M. Mayer. After working for a few more firms, in 1973, Soros set up his own hedge fund (the Soros Fund, soon after renamed the Quantum Fund and later the Quantum Fund Endowment) with $12 million from investors. The fund, with Soros at the helm, found massive success through its various iterations, and as of September 2015, Soros, at 85 years of age, was deemed as the 21st richest person in the world.
Activities and Controversies
Soros began his philanthropic activity in 1979, and he established the Open Society Foundations in 1984. The foundations fund a range of global initiatives “to advance justice, education, public health, business development and independent media.” The causes Soros helps with his foundations are numerous (the foundations’ list of activities goes on for 500 pages), but they include aiding in regions struck by natural disaster, establishing after-school programs in New York City, funding the arts, lending financial assistance to the Russian university system, fighting disease and combating “brain drain” in Eastern Europe.
While a towering figure in the philanthropic world, Soros is also a provocative figure. Among his controversial positions are that he supports altering the United States’ “war on drugs” to avoid the current extent of criminalization; he was involved in and profited heavily from the U.K. currency crisis of 1992 (dubbed Black Wednesday); he has written several books on the looming collapse of the financial markets (and certain observers accuse him of manipulating the markets to reach his ends); and he has said that policies of the United States and Israel have given rise to global anti-Semitism.
Appearing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2018, Soros called for stricter regulations on Facebook and Google.
"They claim they are merely distributing information," he said. "But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access."
Soros also suggested the tech behemoths could "compromise themselves" to enter the Chinese market, thereby melding corporate surveillance with state-sponsored surveillance to produce "a web of totalitarian control."
Controversial or beloved, with his countless organizations (through which he shapes public policy and undertakes vast humanitarian projects), financial empire and the 14 books he’s written on subjects ranging from the war on terror to global capitalism, George Soros is an influential figure and a giant in finance and the realm of philanthropy.
Wife and Children
Soros has five children and has been divorced twice. He married his third wife, Tamiko Bolton, in 2013.
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Citation Information
Article Title
George Soros Biography
Author
Biography.com Editors
Website Name
The Biography.com website
URL
https://www.biography.com/business-figure/george-soros
Access Date
October 9, 2019
Publisher
A&E Television Networks
Last Updated
October 3, 2019
Original Published Date
April 2, 2014
George Soros
Founder / Chair
Under George Soros’s leadership, the Open Society Foundations support individuals and organizations across the globe fighting for freedom of expression, accountable government, and societies that promote justice and equality.
2:11
Personal History
George Soros experienced ethnic and political intolerance firsthand. Born in Hungary in 1930, he lived through the Nazi occupation of 1944–1945, which resulted in the murder of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews. His own Jewish family survived by securing false identity papers, concealing their backgrounds, and helping others do the same. Soros later recalled that “not only did we survive, but we managed to help others.”
“1944, the year of the German occupation, was my formative experience. Instead of submitting to our fate we resisted an evil force that was much stronger than we were—yet we prevailed.” —George Soros
As the Communists consolidated power in Hungary after the war, Soros left Budapest in 1947 for London, working part-time as a railway porter and as a night-club waiter to support his studies at the London School of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States, entering the world of finance and investments, where he made his fortune. In 1970, he launched his own hedge fund and went on to become one of the most successful investors in the history of the United States.
George Soros stands in Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 2004. Photo credit: © Daniel Biskup/laif/Redux
Launching the Open Society Foundations
George Soros used his fortune to create the Open Society Foundations—a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 120 countries. Our name and work reflect the influence on Soros’s thinking of the philosophy of Karl Popper, which Soros first encountered at the London School of Economics. In his book Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argues that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter of truth, and that societies can only flourish when they allow for democratic governance, freedom of expression, and respect for individual rights—an approach at the core of the Open Society Foundations’ work.
An Expanding Mission
George Soros began his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he helped promote the open exchange of ideas in Communist Hungary by funding academic visits to the West and supporting fledgling independent cultural groups, as well as other initiatives. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he created Central European University as a space to foster critical thinking—which at that time was an alien concept for most universities in the former Communist bloc.
With the Cold War over, he gradually expanded his philanthropy to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States, supporting a vast array of new efforts to create more accountable, transparent, and democratic societies. He was one of the early prominent voices to criticize the war on drugs as “arguably more harmful than the drug problem itself,” and helped kick-start America’s medical marijuana movement. In the early 2000s, he became a vocal backer of same-sex marriage efforts. Though his causes have evolved over time, they continue to hew closely to his ideals of an open society.
Highlights of George Soros and the Open Society Foundations
Starting to Build a More Open World
1979
Central European University Opens Its Doors
1991
Explore our history and timeline
His giving has reached beyond his own Foundations, supporting independent organizations such as Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Now in his 80s, Soros continues to take an active personal interest in the Open Society Foundations, traveling widely to support our work and advocating for positive policy changes with world leaders, both publicly and privately.
In 2017, the Open Society Foundations announced that Soros had transferred $18 billion of his fortune into an endowment that would fund the future work of the Foundations, bringing his total giving to the Foundations since 1984 to over $32 billion.
“I believe that in philanthropy one should do the right thing, whether or not it succeeds.” —George Soros
Throughout Soros’s philanthropic career, one thing has remained constant: a commitment to fighting the world’s most intractable problems. He has been known to emphasize the importance of tackling losing causes. Indeed, many of the issues Soros has taken on—and he would be the first to admit this—are the types of issues for which a complete solution might never emerge.
“My success in the financial markets has given me a greater degree of independence than most other people,” Soros once wrote. That independence has allowed him to forge his own path toward a world that’s more open, more just, and more equitable for all.
For more information about George Soros’s activities that are separate from the Open Society Foundations, visit georgesoros.com.
QUOTED: "an impassioned analysis of what he considers the most pressing political, social, and economic problems."
"a timely appeal for radical change."
Soros, George IN DEFENSE OF OPEN SOCIETY PublicAffairs (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 10, 22 ISBN: 978-1-5417-3670-2
The noted philanthropist diagnoses threats to liberal democracy.
Wealthy financier Soros (The Tragedy of the European Union: Disintegration or Revival?, 2014, etc.), founder of the Open Society Foundations, gathers a selection of recent articles, speeches, and book excerpts offering an impassioned analysis of what he considers the most pressing political, social, and economic problems. The author has devoted vigorous efforts and considerable funds to support what he calls political philanthropy: the influx of money and expertise aimed at making the world "a better place." At first focused on developing nations, he now assigns more than half of his foundations' budget to the U.S. and Europe, where he believes the "democratic achievements of the past" are being undermined. Among the threats he cited in a 2018 speech at the World Economic Forum are North Korea, climate change, the lack of a functioning two-party system in the U.S., artificial intelligence and social media as tools for social control, extremist ideologies, and repressive regimes in Europe and China. He is concerned, as well, about attacks on the European Union, conceding that the EU, governed by outdated treaties, "needs to be radically reinvented" through "a collaborative effort that combines the top-down approach of the European institutions with the bottom-up initiatives that are necessary to engage the electorate." Three issues loom as especially problematic for the EU: the refugee crisis, "territorial disintegration as exemplified by Brexit," and the need to address economic growth. Soros recounts the difficulties he faced in establishing Central European University to promote academic freedom. A final chapter explicates his economic theory, "radically different from orthodox economics"; although revised from an earlier article, it is still somewhat confusing. Characterizing himself as "admittedly selfish and self-centered," an egocentric philanthropist in love with his own ideas, Soros admits to finding pleasure in altruism. "I no longer see any reason to feel ashamed of having such a large ego," he writes, "because it turned out to be beneficial both to me and to many others."
A timely appeal for radical change.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Soros, George: IN DEFENSE OF OPEN SOCIETY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964537/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=94d58ef4. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964537
QUOTED: "This is an accessible starting point for those seeking insights into Soros’s current thinking."
In Defense of Open Society
George Soros. PublicAffairs, $26 (224p) ISBN 978-1-5417-3670-2
Philanthropist Soros (The Tragedy of the European Union) offers a slim guide to his economic philosophies and the work his Open Society Foundations have done to promote democracy around the world. Collecting recent writings and speeches, Soros details his charitable network’s organizational structure and describes such initiatives as providing scholarships to black students in apartheid-era South Africa; establishing a cultural foundation in his native Hungary to expose the “falsehood” of Communist Party dogma; and supporting drug policy reform and end-of-life care in the U.S. Elsewhere, he offers a detailed analysis of the 2008 financial crash and its implications for the stock market. Speaking to the current global political moment, Soros describes Facebook, Google, and other “internet monopolies,” as a “menace,” and contends that the European Union is facing an “existential crisis” brought about by Brexit, the refugee crisis, and austerity measures. In a speech delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2019, Soros suggests that President Trump will make concessions to China while renewing his trade war with U.S. allies. While that analysis has been undermined by recent events, his warning that the White House needs to develop a “sophisticated, detailed, and practical” plan to deal with China remains sound. This is an accessible starting point for those seeking insights into Soros’s current thinking. (Oct.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on : 09/06/2019
Release date: 09/24/2019
Genre: Nonfiction