Episode 540
George Soros
Thu, 2018-Oct-25 01:30 UTC
Length - 3:41
Direct Link
Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a popular Wikipedia page every day.
With 177,749 views on Wednesday, 24 October 2018 our article of the day is George Soros.
George Soros, Hon (born György Schwartz; August 12, 1930) is a Hungarian-American investor, business magnate, philanthropist, political activist and author. He is one of the world's most successful investors. As of February 2018, he had a net worth of $8 billion, after donating $18 billion to his philanthropic agency, Open Society Foundations.Born in Budapest, Soros survived Nazi Germany-occupied Hungary and emigrated to England 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 England 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' overall net worth.Soros is known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" because of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of Pound sterling, which made him a profit of $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis. 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.Soros is a well-known supporter of American progressive and American liberal political causes, to which he dispenses donations through his foundation, the Open Society Foundations. Between 1979 and 2011, he donated more than $11 billion to various philanthropic causes; by 2017, his donations "on civil initiatives to reduce poverty and increase transparency, and on scholarships and universities around the world" totaled $12 billion. He influenced the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and provided one of Europe's largest higher education endowments to the Central European University in his Hungarian hometown. His extensive funding of political causes has made him a "bugaboo of European nationalists". Numerous American conservatives have repeated conspiracy theories that characterize Soros as a singularly dangerous "puppetmaster" behind a variety of alleged global plots.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:30 UTC on Thursday, 25 October 2018.
For the full current version of the article, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros.
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