George Soros

He emigrated to England in 1947 and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952. In 1956, he moved to the United States. He is married with five children.

Soros is the chairman of Soros Fund Management[?] and of the Open Society Institute[?].

Soros became instantly famous on September 22, 1992, when, believing the British pound[?] was overvalued, he speculated heavily against it. The Bank of England was forced to withdraw the currency out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism[?], and Soros earned an estimated US$1 billion in the process. He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England." In 1997, under similar circumstances, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad accused Soros of bringing down the Malaysian currency, the ringgit[?].

Soros is a controversial figure because on the one hand, as an international investor and currency speculator, he has become extremely wealthy (his fortune in 2000 was estimated at US$ five billion). On the other, he freely acknowledges that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries.

Soros received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York), the University of Oxford in 1980, the Budapest University of Economics[?], and Yale University in 1991.

Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town[?] in apartheid South Africa.

Published Works

• George Soros on Globalization (PublicAffairs, March 2002)
• Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000).
• The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (1998)
• Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995)
• Underwriting Democracy (1991)
• Opening the Soviet System (1990)
• The Alchemy of Finance (1987)

External Links and references

• The Soros Foundation (http://www.soros.org/)
• George Soros, "The bubble of American supremacy" (http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2003/03/13/200303130033.asp), Editorial in The Korea Herald[?], March 12, 2003.