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Comment by AndrewBissell | Hacker News Reader

Politicians always like to blame speculators when their attempts to fight the market inevitably end in failure, and this instance is no different. Soros didn't "break the GBP," it was already broken and the British government's guarantee to prop it up was never sustainable in the first place.

Someone was going to a lot of make money when the British government's scheme unraveled. Soros just happened to make a lot more than anyone else. Reminds me of a good Rhett Butler quote: "Opportunists have always been held in disrepute. Especially by those who had the same opportunities and didn't take them."

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You do realize that most people do not take the same opportunities because they consider them ethically and morally disgusting? That maybe we're not just a bunch of fools floundering around bumping into just enough money to survive?

I'm always amazed how opportunists think they are the only ones who thought of their schemes.

What was morally or ethically disgusting about Soros profiting greatly at the expense of the British Government?

Do you think it's morally or ethically wrong that you paid $3 for a hamburger that McDonald's only paid $2 to produce?

Opportunities and tradeoffs exist all around us. It's simply how our world works.

I'm not going to debate whether there is a general morality to his actions or many actions of those in finance. What I was stating was that many people do not go into these lines of work and/or do things, not because they are incapable or because they do not see the same opportunities but because they think they are unethical and immoral.

This may help you, and the original gentleman I responded to in understanding that its not necessarily a case of having the stronger ability but sometimes a case of having a weaker conscience.

The thing about McDonals, a company making profits in a consensual trade is a total non-sequitur.

What I assume is disgusting is that the British Government's money actually belong to British taxpayers, who contributed it in the first place. Those taxpayers have reasonable expectations that this money will be used to indirectly benefit them or for the good of the British people at large, and not end up squandered.

Now other people correctly pointed out that the pound would have devaluated with or without Soros, so I don't think his actions where all that unethical. But as it happened so suddenly instead of the usual drawn-out game of rumors, some politicians clearly felt the burn.

It WAS a consensual trade between the British government and Soros, in effect.... the gov could have at any time earlier in the process stopped buying obviously over priced pounds, but they didn't.... yes, the gov was spending tax payers money in doing those deals, but the tax payers had selected John Major, and he was quite clear on his position in terms of monetary policy.

Yes it was, but that's nitpicking. I think you get my point: buying burgers and trying to manipulate the market are two rather different separate things.

But who was trying to manipulate the market? Soros? Well, yes, he was. The British government? They also were.

Why do you find one morally repugnant and not the other?

Well, they contributed it certainly but it belongs to the British Government in right of the crown.

Both parties were engaged in currency manipulation of their own free will, no one forced the british government to take their currency position.

Go back and read the article again. Soros was able to make as much as he did because most of the market was convinced, incorrectly, that the British government would succeed in propping up the pound. This was not some trade that everyone saw the chance to make and just passed on it out of the goodness of their hearts. Big successful trades are always obvious to everyone in hindsight.

I suppose one's perspective on the whole affair depends a lot on whether you think governments should be using the public treasury to manipulate markets and try to muscle asset prices in one direction or another. Since I think that is arrogant folly, and destined to end in costly failure regardless, better to have some speculator come along and put a stop to it before it can drag on and result in even more losses to the public.

Actually it was you who misunderstood. He made money because everyone saw the writing was on the wall, and that the pound was going to plummet; Soros became the triggering event. He had a first-mover's advantage.

If everyone thought the pound was going to be just fine, they'd happily buy his sterling and nothing would have happened. But the expectation was that the pound was overvalued and would soon nosedive. So when Soros' sales began to apply downward pressure to the price, everyone bandwagoned because that was what they were going to do anyway.

Yes, but the issue people are taking is that the will of parliament/government was not absolute. England guaranteed they would do this, signed an international treaty, then refused to do it.

Like today with Ukraine. NATO's primary goal was to protect member nations territorial integrity against Russian incursion. Who here still believes NATO will do that, even if Russia just annexes the entirety of Ukraine and Poland ?

The big issue people are having here is that it's an instance of clearly the government not being in control. What use is democracy if the government isn't in control ? What use is NATO if it doesn't respond to territorial incursions ?

> NATO's primary goal was to protect member nations territorial integrity against Russian incursion. Who here still believes NATO will do that

There's a big difference between annexing (parts of, or even all of) Ukraine (which isn't a NATO member), and Poland (which is not only in NATO, but also the EU)

1st, trades like this don't ever EVER happen out of the blue; there is always corruption - insider information and insider trading ..and market manipulation involved(just based on the leaks and medialised information during the past 2 years its pretty safe to say that all major markets are rigged). This trend of idealizing sociopathic individualism and white-collar criminals that are destroying the lives and feeding on the wealth of millions, disguising it as some acts of genius is making me mad(Wolf of Wall Street? seriously?). We are being robbed and a lot of money is being spent on promoting this the way you just did..

UA is not in NATO, this alone renders your "notion" a little misleading at best. Shouldn't NATO been dissolved after the Warshaw Pact ended? Who is really the "bad guy" in this complicated matter? Is the corrupt oligopolistic Russia(that was literaly taken apart 2 decades ago) the real aggressor?[1] But since this is not about UA I'll leave it here.

I do agree with your 3rd paragraph though. We're experiencing a play on democracy - a oppressive global regime with its equivalent of kings, aristocracy, vassals, the dirt in between and slavery, packed in golden toilet paper.. with a lot of democracy-stickers on it..

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nntB872pJ20

The BoE was the one trying to manipulate the market and the market reacted.

Your example is misleading. Ukraine is not a part of NATO (unlike Poland you have mentioned) and alliance cannot start military actions there legally, unless it threatens one of the member countries directly. Such actions would surely provoke a war with Russia and no sane west politician would want that.

As opposed to all of the opportunists on the other side of the trade betting the currency would go the other direction and they'd profit off of that instead.

Except in this case there weren't any opportunists on the other side of the trade. The only entity crazy enough to take the other side was the British government. That's what made it such a sure thing.

I guarantee you that the average guy trying his hand at the market doesn't care about what people on the Internet might preach about their decisions later. The fact of the matter is most people don't take those opportunities because most people are very bad at speculation.

Among people who have Soros-level financial power and moxie, they generally are current with economic thought, in which fixed currencies in developed countries are considered a very bad thing by just about everyone. The British government was not doing the world any favors by fixing the pound. The sooner its fixed rate was broken, the better.

It is convenient to tell yourself that smart people like you are not rich because you are too good to be rich, but this doesn't align with reality, not in this particular case nor in general.

To be fair, their aims were lophty even if their methods were crude.

>You do realize that most people do not take the same opportunities because they consider them ethically and morally disgusting? That maybe we're not just a bunch of fools floundering around bumping into just enough money to survive?

If most people are so ethical and moral as to not take a bet against another entity, in this case the government, how do they reconcile significant moral and ethical issues such as the following with themselves:

- The fact that a vast quantity of consumer electronic goods are made under conditions that have been documented to be absolutely horrendous in Asia? In factories whose employees are so stomped upon, that there has been a significant issue with employee suicide on the job?

Those morals and ethics certainly haven't prevented "most people" from pushing demand for these consumer electronics in the West.

- Industrial fishing / trawling and the sheer damage it has done to the oceans. There is sustained demand for fish caught using these methods, yet it is these methods that are destroying fish stocks so frequently that they're having trouble replenishing / breeding again. Fish we don't eat, or mammals caught in the activity, end up being tossed back into the water, dead over nothing.

How do most people, being moral and ethical, not just allow this to continue but push demand for it by asking for cheaper and cheaper fish to be available?

- Oil. How are most people, being honest and moral, still fueling demand for oil - and putting pressure in place for cheaper oil (thus increased quantity must be found) - when these activities are polluting oceans, destroying habitats etc. and whose proceeds are propping up very brutal, very oppressive regimes in some oil producing countries in the Middle East?

I could continue listing these absolutely unethical, absolutely immoral activities that we, "most people", continue to support on a daily basis but I believe the point should be clear.

"Most people" do not take advantage of economic / financial opportunities because such opportunities generally require:

i - Significant capital for significant returns

ii - Risk aversion, as one must risk significant capital and may have hugely negative returns, if any at all.

So let us not pretend that most people took the ethical and moral high ground here.

It was going to happen anyway, so there's nothing wrong with benefiting from it, yes?

If a man with diamond cufflinks and a fat wallet is passed-out drunk on the sidewalk at midnight in a bad neighborhood, he is definitely going to get robbed. Does that mean I should go ahead and rob him myself with a clear conscience?

I guess, according to you and Rhett Butler, I'm just jealous because I didn't pickpocket the last drunk I met.

Well, no. Robbing a passed out drunk is a crime; you should feel bad for committing crimes, even if it's clear that if you didn't somebody else would.

Shorting a stock (or a currency) is not a crime; it's an acceptable thing to do in a market.

I was under the impression that we frown on screwing innocent people because it's a shitty thing to do, not because it happens to be designated as a crime.

I'm not saying that what Soros did should be illegal, mainly because overregulation can wind up screwing innocent people in all sorts of different ways that I'm not wise enough to predict. But I surely don't understand why he's being held up for praise.

We do frown on screwing innocent people, and it is a shitty thing to do.

Who screwed Britain? If you're going to tell me that it was George Soros, I'd like to hear why you're holding him more responsible than e.g. Helmut Schlesinger, or the reporter who paraphrased Schlesinger's quote and sent the market into a panic?

edit: Or as loso pointed out in a comment above mine, is George Soros more responsible than the members of the British government who put the pound sterling in the terrible position to begin with?

Most (or at least some) of the politicians likely acted in good faith, believing they were doing the best for their country. Soros knew he would leave the people devastated but didn't care.

That may be true, but I don't think it's relevant. The politicians still made bad decisions that led the country to ruin; you can say they didn't mean it, but that doesn't make it not their fault, nor does it mean it wouldn't have happened if Soros hadn't shorted the pound.

And to rephrase the second sentence: Soros knew that the bad policy decisions of the politicians would leave the people devastated, but didn't care. Again, I'm not convinced that's relevant; Soros didn't make the situation, he just profited by it. That doesn't make it his fault.

I agree with CocaKola that this isn't relevant - I'd vote against having people acting in good faith, if the end result is getting screwed.

As to your other point, this is how markets are supposed to work. Soros in effect helped show the incompetency of the government, which was a net good. People got screwed, certainly, but the situation was terrible and no one did anything about it until Soros stepped in.

You could say that he is similar to Snowden or other whistleblowers in many ways. They through the government into chaos, likely endangered a lot of the economy and possibly lives, and they did it all because exposing the bad things the government was doing was more important.

Of course, I'm not arguing that it's the same, as the whistleblowers do this despite the fact that it ruins their lives, and Soros did it to make money. What I am saying is, it's great we've setup a system where people like Soros are incentivized to uncover government screwups, so we can do better next time.

> As to your other point, this is how markets are supposed to work. Soros in effect helped show the incompetency of the government, which was a net good. People got screwed, certainly, but the situation was terrible and no one did anything about it until Soros stepped in.

> You could say that he is similar to Snowden or other whistleblowers in many ways. They through the government into chaos, likely endangered a lot of the economy and possibly lives, and they did it all because exposing the bad things the government was doing was more important.

Grotesque. Soros certainly didn't give a damn about the public good. A better comparison would be somebody blowing a nuclear power plant to make a point that the security measures are insufficient. Should we congratulate terrorists next, because we can "do better" next time in terms of security?

> Of course, I'm not arguing that it's the same, as the whistleblowers do this despite the fact that it ruins their lives, and Soros did it to make money. What I am saying is, it's great we've setup a system where people like Soros are incentivized to uncover government screwups, so we can do better next time.

Really? Let me ask you, why was the situation terrible exactly? Because the pound was overvalued and exposed to the same predatory behaviour Soros demonstrated? Oh, right...

I think a £3.3b loss is hardly devastating.

GDP in 1994 was £693bn

Govt. spending was £4,687 per capita and this loss was about £54 per capita.

Not zero but hardly devastating.

http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/piechart_1994_UK_total

£3.3b in 1994 would be £6bn today.

As a comparison, in 1999 Gordon Brown sold the UK's gold before the market moved up, the equivalent of a £9b loss, £13b in today's money. He did this to give the banks an under the radar bailout by manipulating the markets.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/thomaspascoe/100018367/...

It's less about the total loss of money and more about the valuation of the currency. The mid-nineties saw the pound drop even further in value and it's only recently begun to grow stronger again.

Not sure I agree that it has been 20 years of straight recovery. In the late 2000s it was 2:1 with USD for a time.

Gold doesn't pay interest, whereas the cash raised from the gold sale was used to buy (mostly) long term US treasuries to replace the gold in the BoE's asset portfolio. These have performed very well as an investment over the intervening years (look at, eg the BTTRX fund for a rough equivalent in the private sector) so the net loss is much smaller than you'd think.

> Who screwed Britain? If you're going to tell me that it was George Soros, I'd like to hear why you're holding him more responsible than e.g. Helmut Schlesinger, or the reporter who paraphrased Schlesinger's quote and sent the market into a panic?

As I said elsewhere, there's plenty of blame to go around. Lots of people were complicit, some of them more so than Soros. But Soros is the only one who's commonly held up as some sort of heroic capitalist ubermensch, so he's the one I went after.

Soros profited off of a screw up by the British government. And not just one screw up, many if you look at the full history of what happened. I think the British government screwed their people way more than Soros did.

The British government might be the least "innocent" institution in existence.

I was referring to the British taxpayers, not the government.

You think the British government is the "most guilty" institution in existence? Unless you cling to the idea that eradicated institutions (such as the Third Reich) don't count this seems more than a little harsh.

Well, the British Empire certainly has blood-stained hands, but that's sort of irrelevant to the discussion here (and what country/empire doesn't?)

Well just to clarify, I wasn't counting the 3rd Reich since it is "dead", similar for Ghengis Khan and the Romans.

To me, guilt is what you've done, innocence is what you haven't done. The British government has done pretty much everything.

Doesn't the phrase "in existence" by definition disqualify institutions which are eradicated and thus don't exist?

And selling bad credit default swaps wasn't a crime either.

So, according to your theory, the perpetrators of the last downturn should have sold as many bogus CDS packages as possible, right? Regardless of the damage?

I'm happy most people don't subscribe to the same law-defined morals that you seem to.

If Soros's bet had gone against him, he would have lost all of his investors' money and been left penniless. There would have been no bailout waiting in the wings.

The guys selling CDSs they couldn't pay out had none of their own skin in the game, and were profiting from the presence of then implicit (now very EXPLICIT) government backstops. When they lost money, the public was forced to pay through devices like the AIG bailout, TARP, ZIRP, etc.

There's no legitimate comparison between the two.

> If Soros's bet had gone against him, he would have lost all of his investors' money and been left penniless. There would have been no bailout waiting in the wings.

Well, no. This is explained in the article: If Soros' assumption (that the exchange rate would plummet) hadn't been realised Sterling would've stayed at the lower bound of the ERM and Quantum wouldn't have lost much at all.

We can have reasonable confidence in that assessment in hindsight. At the time, I would have been unwilling to gamble my net worth against the possibility of some unforeseen event causing a spike in the value of the pound. It was a non-zero risk.

Soros clearly had confidence in it. That's why he's the player that won the pot.

There was a lot of fraud involved in the banks and mortgage brokers who made hundreds of thousands of liar's loans: the fact that nobody was prosecuted for that fraud is a failure of the justice and regulatory systems..

I have regularly argued that much of it was, in fact, illegal. At a minimum there was a lot of negligence with regard to fiduciary responsibility. I would also argue that there was a fair amount of fraud from borrowers, mortgage brokers, banks, and so on all the way up to the top financial levels.

> you should feel bad for committing crimes, even if it's clear that if you didn't somebody else would

i don't think edward snowden should feel bad for what he did, even if it's considered a crime.

as for robbing a drunk guy in the gutter, you could argue that you are teaching him a lesson, and that the price of this lesson is the cash he has in his wallet now. it would be a rather aggresive marketing strategy, but hopefully the guy does learn from it.

likewise, you could argue that soros breaking the bank of England is him teaching the people of the world a lesson - you can't prop up a currency indefinitely. people like him - folks with lots of money and more desire to earn money than to support practices they think are unsustainable - will prevent governments from pegging rates indefinitely, just as muggers will prevent people from wandering carelessly through parts of town where no one is watching them.

i'd like to live in a world where people were more interested in gaining a positive reputation by passing on the chance to profit from destruction, even if it's legal. that wish is exactly like wanting to live in a world where nobody gets mugged: both of those situations are inevitable if omnipresent surveillance takes off. if being caught is a certainty, nobody's going to pick a wallet anywhere. if databases of people's responses to your actions are publicly available, many supporters of government-backed monetary policy - as well as the friends and families of those who suffered from his actions - will shun soros and anyone else who helps knock a tower over because 'it was going to fall anyhow.'

I have no idea what you're saying. You're bringing up Edward Snowden, who has literally nothing to do with the conversation at hand. Then you're proposing some form of defense for the idea of mugging the drunk guy. Then you're shifting right to omnipresent surveillance, which again has nothing to do with what we're talking about. Your comment is utterly incomprehensible to me; I know what all the individual words mean, but I can't put them together into a cohesive thought that's relevant.

Can you rephrase yourself in a way that's more understandable?

> You're bringing up Edward Snowden, who has literally nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

That was pretty clearly a response to the line he quoted directly above, i.e. rebutting the notion that an action's morality is solely determined by whether or not that action is classified as a crime.

Ah; I must have missed the part where somebody stated that an action's morality is solely determined by whether or not that action is classified as a crime. I agree that that's a silly metric to use as the sole determination of the morality of an action, but can you do me a favour and point to where that was stated? I'm having trouble finding it.

A ways upthread, you said:

> Well, no. Robbing a passed out drunk is a crime; you should feel bad for committing crimes, even if it's clear that if you didn't somebody else would. Shorting a stock (or a currency) is not a crime; it's an acceptable thing to do in a market.

If you didn't intend to imply that robbing the drunk is bad because it's a crime, and what Soros did is acceptable because it's not a crime, then you weren't communicating very clearly.

some ideas i got while reading your interesting post, sketched them out and think are interesting and useful for someone to consider but not important enough for me to bother arranging into cohesive structure (and so potentially asis contain some nonsense, lol):

consider/distinguish/define innocence vs unawareness vs incompetence

innocent of what ?

is it ok to eat cows ? distinguish from unconscious / unaware / stupid / mentally challenged humans at a biological level - self reflection in another person ? empathy ? isn't that really selfish.. (is selfishness wrong anyways)

yes law | crime != justice | morality

however internal sense of justice, morality - some forms of it (internalised socialism/communism) are a heavy burden and disadvantage, objectively wrong

because

thoroughly exploited by weak / lazy / unlucky people and groups, and various degrees of sociopaths and most of all exploited by the great unaware masses - innocents ? - muppets ?

otoh social cooperation beneficial to all (if that is _the_ goal) only if driven by free will in a way that benefits each member according to his own estimate of his own needs & desires and willing sacrifices to trade .. (benefits vs costs)

is morality guided by relative quantity of beneficiaries/victims & 'quality' of some definitions and scopes of benefit vs harms relative harm or good, does an objective 'detached' harm / goodness exist without context. (harm / goodness are not nouns, not objects, just results from actions) no 'cold' objective guidelines ..offtopic philosophising

self sacrifice without self benefit = self destruction for someone else's benefit, or no benefit at all - just stupid

re reputation - an external motive, essentially hunger for reward + fear of punishment, at a social level :. potentially a form of hypocrisy, not 'real' internal morality

re omnipresent monitoring - fucking creepy kafkaesque horror show... lol, i think population will creep out waay before it ever happens, privacy awareness is already entering mainstream (snowden, visible hackings, internet driven mainstreamising of countercultures)

..re soros et al: foregoing opportunities to appease the incompetent (or unaware, stupid) is a form of self sacrifice - for people who don't deserve it / appreciate it / fucked over by their own government and muppetry / there's really no reward / stupid and futile

Since I don't agree with your premise that successful speculations are morally equivalent to robbery, your entire analogy seems ridiculous to me.

He was attacking your statement: "Someone was going to a lot of make money when the British government's scheme unraveled."

I think the point is clear, morality has nothing to do with whether something is definitely going to happen or not. If you're taking advantage of a situation and you deem it immoral, whether the end result would have been the same even if you hadn't participated is irrelevant, it's still an immoral action.

Whether robbery and speculation are equivalent is a different point from the one being made. Obviously analogies aren't perfect, I think most people here realize that from the very definition that analogous situations aren't the same. But it's still a useful tool to make an argument with.

If trading currency is immoral then the british government is no more moral than Soros, like tango trading takes two.

To introduce another bad analogy in to the conversation, eating cheese is not immoral but forcing a 10kg block of cheddar into somebody's mouth is.

Black Wednesday still has political and economic consequences more than 20 years later - the UK is not a member of the Euro and the Right may potentially pull us out of the EU altogether. The (de)merits of both positions notwithstanding, Black Wednesday certainly still has a huge psychological effect on our relationship with the rest of Europe.

Just a FYI, some of us feel that eating cheese is immoral.

Hmm, true. I had forgotten about veganism, sorry.

Another way of looking at it is this: had the pound remained on the ERM, Britain would have remained on-track to join the Euro. Assuming no devaluation of the pound (the incident that caused Britain to leave the ERM), the pound would have become part of the Euro at a ruinously high exchange rate relative to the Deutschmark. In the financial collapse of 2008, Britain would not have been able to lower interest rates or run quantitative easing. This is basically the predicament that Spain, Italy and Greece are in (though Greece has other problems). They have been forced to carry out "internal devaluation" by cutting spending and wages, and due to the sticky prices effect this basically means making very large numbers of people unemployed.

Of course, you could argue another counter-factual, that Britain within the Euro would have tipped the balance of power in the ECB in favour of a much more doveish monetary policy from 2008, and thus saved Europe from calamity. It's really hard to speculate about these kinds of reflexive dynamics.

Except Great Britain is the sole maker of cheese, and forces under threat of violence the citizens of the UK to pay their taxes and other debts in cheese, and it costs Britain nothing to make cheese.

They didn't force a 10 kg block down any ones throat, they choose of their own volition to buy 10 kg of cheese at price they knew to be outrageous, to maintain their manipulated price of cheese because they are the sole maker of cheese.

So as the sole supplier of cheese they fucked up the market by flooding it with cheese, then realizing what they had done bought fuck loads of cheese that costs nothing to produce to maintain their inflated price of cheese. Fuck them.

His premise is something similar to what I was going to write and then didn't for brevity - the general justification touted for Soros doing what he did is that the British government were incompetent and deserved what they got - it's equivalent to saying the drunk deserves everything he gets because he should have known better. A third party's incompetence isn't a moral justification for your proactive exploration of their incompetence.

So in your mind, there's no difference between engaging in a transaction that both parties enter into willingly, fully in control of their faculties, and robbing a drunken, passed out individual? Because that analogy holds those two things to be equal.

If a car dealer knowingly sells you a lemon, is it a consensual exchange? I don't think was Soros did was absolutely unethical, but its ridiculous to pretend that it was squeaky clean. One party thought this to be an ordinary transaction; the other party knew it would debase the currency.

I think the poker analogy is a better one.

Two parties took a bet, as in a poker game. They each though they were doing the right thing. Turns out, one of them had a winning hand and one of them didn't.

But since everyone knew the nature of the game, and everyone knew they were making bets, why is it unethical?

Really, I would think more anger should be placed on the politicians who got monetary policy so drastically wrong. Or maybe anger is wrong - maybe I should say "learn from this". Because heaping anger on someone who outplayed you is a great way to mask the fact that you need to learn.

Its not that I think Soros should be "blamed" per say, it just doesn't speak highly of his character. He put profits before the wellbeing of the British people. Clearly he doesn't feel an ethical obligation to them. I would have.

But you're right. Judging Soros gets us nowhere, drawing lessons from this does.

Except it was the BoE that was selling lemons. Sorros knew they were and exchanged them for oranges while he could.

As a Brit, this comment made me smile because of how accurate it was.

Black Wednesday was probably topped only by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sale_of_UK_gold_reserves,_1999%... in the buffoonery stakes.

Fellow Brit

Some think the gold selloff was an under the radar bailout

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/thomaspascoe/100018367/...

Great link.

In this analogy, what are the lemons and who is the car dealer?

Keep in mind that the dealer was making the offer to sell, so it's like a push pull or drag sale.

So dealer makes an offer saying "We will give you $10,000 for any clunker, no quantity restrictions, if it has wheels and starts we'll give you $10,000" so Mr. Soros thinks to himself, this is a rediculous offer and starts buying everything on craigslist for less than $10,000. He rolls up with 100 lemons and the dealer buys them, then has a press conference saying he has $15 billion dollars on hand an will buy all the lemons in the world for $10,000 a piece.

So George Soros goes and finds $30 billion lemons and it turns out that the gov't couldn't (or didn't want to) come up with $15 more billion for lemons. Yes, the tax payer got fleeced, but the transactions were made in good faith by people who thought buying lemons for $10,000 was a good fucking idea, and was elected on a fucking platform of buying lemons for $10K.

When we abstract away the situation, then it all seems simple - we assume both parties (the BoE and Soros) are willing, aware and self-motivated actors in control of themselves.

However, there WERE other parameters. George Soros clearly believed the government to be incompetent/incapacitated (up against a wall), and took full advantage. It's also a zero-sum game where the loser isn't a single, self-motivated individual - it's a body of taxpayers who aren't explicitly consulted or perhaps even aware of the transaction, which calls into question the "willing, self-aware" parameter. Idealised financial transactions end with "win/lose", whereas ruining a whole economy like that results in years of decreased quality of life for other individuals, which has a moral implication. Soros was undoubtedly aware that his transaction would disadvantage a huge number of people, but did it anyway. He could have acted in such a way that netted him lots of money (a million, 10 million, 100 million) whilst still minimising taxpayer losses, but he didn't at all.

So in pure, simplified transactional terms, yeah fair game. In "big picture" we-are-all-human-beings terms, there's a huge moral hole here.

Sure; I won't argue that it was a jerky thing to do. However, being jerky doesn't make it criminal, and when you say "this is analogous to mugging a passed out rich man in the gutter", you are saying that it's criminal.

Was the British government up against a wall? Yes, but only because they put themselves there. They said "We will buy British Pounds, all you want to sell to us". George Soros said "Well, damn; I bet I can get a lot of pounds. Let's do this." and it turned out that George Soros's ability to borrow pounds was greater than the government's ability to buy them. How is an entity, full of ostensibly smart people, who continually say "Bring it on, I'm not done yet" the same or even similar to a drunken, passed out man? How is somebody who says "You will buy British Pounds? I have some pounds right here; would you like to buy them? Oh, you would? Well hold on, I'll be right back; I bet I can get some more!" the same or similar to somebody who sees a passed out man and slips off the dude's watch?

Robbing a drunk man in the street: Illegal + Immoral

What Soros did: Legal + Immoral.

Indeed. A much better analogy is that a rich sucker sits down to play poker in a casino and gets fleeced by the pros.

If a person leans up against a well and it falls over, do you blame the person or the people who built the wall so shoddy?

Any wall will topple with enough force. And Soros's $10 billion bet was a hell of a lot of force.

If the person is actively pushing the wall over, knowing full well that the wall is structurally unsound, and that there are innocent people behind the wall...yeah, I'd blame the pusher.

If someone takes out a concrete wall with a five-pound sledge, I'm gonna have harsh words for the guy who build the shoddy wall and the guy who deliberately vandalized it.

People always underestimate how valuable information is. When you short a stock or a currency, you are not "screwing" someone, but providing information to others saying "this thing is screwed". If you believe something is wrong, you should announce that to everybody, loud and clear. In a marketplace this "announcement" is carried out by a big short, because that's the only kind of message people are able to hear.

And borrowing from your example, if there is a big group of drunk men marching to an abyss and no one would listen to a word you say ( well they are drunk), then maybe the moral thing to do is punch them in the face and run the other way.

I think the just behavior would have been to explain to the government what was going to happen, and then to leverage the fund's wealth and financial influence to help solve the greater problem. I know, businesses exist to make money. But I can't help but feel like these people who profit off of the missery of the people are just awful, awful humans.

Don't hate the player, hate the game?

Love the game, the sheep handed it to the wolves that day.

The british people made a huge bet and lost, if you don't like losing on trades don't make trades. They blinked to a guy who didn't even have a bank, let alone an army or a navy.

Soros simply had more gumption than the British Empire.

Whenever I hear the word gumption I think of old people with dentures. Great word!

The British people didn't make any kind of bet, the few politicians in power at the time took it, lost hard and still ended up as Lords.

Well, why don't British people do something about those Lords? It's up to them.

Believe me - plenty of us have choice opinions about the Lords.

It is difficult to do much about them when you have a duopoly on elected government, and a big part of both parties' power-broking is doling out lordships to a) their former notable MPs/ministers and b) their mates. The lords suit the commons just fine. Even more so since Blair's reforms, which increased the number who were purely cronies, relative to the decrepit remnants of the landed aristocracy (which only benefited the Tories).

Well, poor you. You don't own yourself, Lords own you. Why blame Soros? Praise him that he didn't help Lords sell you for organs.

For alternatives, see Ukraine with its Maidan.

Where did I blame Soros?

I even own a t-shirt that says "don't hate the player, hate the game."

GP did.

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