George Soros: selfish speculator or market prophet?

Reviled and distrusted for years, speculator George Soros has been grimly predicting financial apocalypse. But is he really the market prophet many believe, or are his predictions made solely for his own gain?

No doomster was more feted at Davos this year than George Soros, who has been grimly predicting financial apocalypse for decades. "After the boy cried wolf three times, the wolf finally came," he told The Wall Street Journal last year. Reviled and distrusted for years as The Man Who Broke the Bank of England, even Soros's most trenchant critics seemed happy to glance over reports that his Quantum Fund has been shorting the pound again to concentrate on his new role as a prophet.

Soros, now 78, is surely "the greatest speculator of the age", says the Evening Standard. His punt against the pound in 1992 earned him £1bn. But it was the follow-up bet against the Thai baht in 1997 that secured the most death threats. Soros has lived under the threat of physical attack ever since and not just from burned-out Asian Tigers. His high-profile campaign to stop the re-election of George W Bush in 2004 made him a hate figure among the US far right, who accuse him of "wrecking civilisation for profit". He is "the face of evil", noted one blogger. "Why the hell hasn't this asshole been assassinated yet?" Much of the invective boils down to a rehash of cod Jewish conspiracy theories. But Soros has been demonised so effectively in the States, says the FT, that "he kept fairly quiet about his support for Obama, lest the association hurt his candidate".

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