Alex S. Gabor publishes his fourth installment of his internationally syndicated column "Soros and Me!" and discusses U.S. - China Relations, Soro's early career in London, and his own personal obsession with pennies and his Uncle George Soros.
NEWS MAX DOESN'T LIKE SOROS BUT CHARGES TO READ ABOUT HIM. HERE IT IS FREE
I once publicized an $8 billion dollar bet I publicly made with George Soros and under my delusional grandeur guaranteed that George Bush would be defeated in the 2004 election.
Obviously I lost that bet and with it all of my delusions came crashing down, winding me up on the streets of Venice, hanging out with the local Boardwalk merchants as the mysterious homeless Hungarian Penny King who was giving the street urchins 500% returns on their pennies!
I was clinging on to the last hope of becoming rich and famous, waiting for the call back from Viacom for their interview with me on the set of “What’s Your Obsession?’, which was pennies, a show that apparently never made it to the MTV crowd.
Flash forward, two years later, still penniless, saddled with millions in real debt, I am gradually climbing out of a self inflicted mud hole of deluded history and bringing myself to maintain the discipline to follow my dreams as a writer.
I have chosen my favorite rich and famous uncle George Soros as my topic in order to bless the world with my talents as an author, filmmaker and director. It will save my life to be finally able to tell George what I really think about him and to pay off that $8 billion debt I lost when George Bush got reelected.
I actually admire the man and wish he were my real uncle. Maybe he will consider adopting me after all is said and done and the fat lady sings.
Millions of Americans still think the election was stolen out of Ohio the second time, as it was the first time in Florida.
I was so under the influence of the magic spell of Mr. Soros that I took it upon myself to offer to buy the Bank of China in 2004 with stock that I tried to sell to the Chinese government through an agent I met online out of Hong Kong when they were hard at work restructuring the local banking system.
Despite remonstrances from Wall Street Journal writers who wondered who the hell I was after reading the press release about my offer, I was still hoping that I could convert that stock to cash if only I won the bet. Talk about the delusions of a narcoleptic gambler.
George Soros is now poking around and making inroads to opening up China that may just blow America away. Taiwan's largest carrier, China Airlines Ltd., recently completed its acquisition of a 25 percent stake in a mainland Chinese air cargo carrier, Yangtze River Express Airlines, a unit of China's Hainan Airlines Company.
Soros controls 14% of Hainan Airlines which announced that it will be making direct flights to New York by the end of the year; as well he owns indirectly about 7% of Jet Blue Airways, already a growing domestic US carrier out of New York.
What is Soros really up to?
While speaking to wide open ears in Singapore at the Raffles City convention centre, he held court to an audience of thousands of academics, government officials, businessmen and undergrads, enthralling them with his beliefs and vision for a global open society.
At least there he didn’t suddenly leave the stage when hecklers began calling him a tool of the Rothschild’s, or hurling insults at him as he did at UC Berkley when I paid $10 to see him speak in 2004, even though I was homeless at the time and living out of my vehicle.
Soros by the time he hit 50 had already made his wealth, yet while I am about to turn 50, still grappling with the wreckage of my past, my only wealth is my word.
I first began to admire George Soros and formally adopted him as my great Uncle in 1994 when I first read a Los Angeles Times article detailing how he made a billion dollars in one day.
I was amazed and thought, "if he could to it, then why couldn’t I", even though I was living out of the West Hollywood Homeless shelter at that time located near the corner of Santa Monica and La Brea, which was later replaced by a huge theatre and shopping center.
It was then that I first conceived of a business plan that would make me the world’s first trillionaire, but that delusion was greatly influenced by my daily use of pot back then. Thank the heavens for 19 months of sobriety.
When George Soros graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE) in the spring of 1953 he was seeking an academic career. “But his grades weren’t good enough,” according to “The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett and George Soros”, written by Mark Tier.
When he finally graduated he took a series of odd jobs until he hit upon the idea that there was money to be made in financial markets.
According to Tier, “Soros wrote a personal letter to the managing director of each of the merchant banks in the City of London. One of his few interviews was with the managing director of Lazard Frères, who gave him an appointment for the sole reason of telling him he was barking up the wrong tree trying to get a job in the City of London.
Later, Soros reported what he had been told: “Here in the City we practice what we call intelligent nepotism. That means that each managing director has a number of nephews, one of whom is intelligent, and he is going to be the next managing director. If you came from the same college as he did, you would have a chance to get a job in the firm. If you came from the same university, you may still be all right. But you’re not even from the same country!”
Pick me, pick me, I’m intelligent, and I could be an adopted nephew! Please pick me! And I am from the same country as Soros! Oh please pick me, pretty please?
Tier goes on in his book that, “Eventually, Soros did secure a job in the City with Singer & Friedlander, whose managing director was, like Soros, Hungarian. His time there was hardly illustrious, though what he was learning by doing — for example, to arbitrage gold stocks — began to make him more comfortable with a financial career. But his time there was hardly an abject failure, either.
"A relative had given him £1,000 (then $4,800) to invest on his behalf. When he left in 1956 to join F.M. Mayer in New York, he took with him $5,000, which was his share of the profits made on that original £1,000. He clearly had a natural talent for operating in the investment marketplace.
"In New York, Soros began arbitraging oil stocks — buying and selling the same securities on different international markets to profit from small price discrepancies. But he first made his mark on Wall Street as a research analyst covering European stocks, where he had enormous success until John F. Kennedy introduced the “interest equalisation tax” to “protect” the balance of payments.
"This 15 per cent tax on foreign investments brought Soros’s high-flying business in European stocks to a crashing halt. With little to do, he turned back to philosophy. In 1961 and 1962 he worked weekends and evenings on The Burden of Consciousness, a book he had begun writing while studying at the LSE.
"He did indeed complete it, but it failed to satisfy him. “There came a day when I was re-reading what I had written the day before and couldn't make sense of it,” Soros wrote later. “I now realize that I was mainly regurgitating Karl Popper’s ideas. But I haven’t given up the illusion that I have something important and original to say.”
"It was only then, at the age of 32 that Soros decided to focus his full attention on investing. In 1963 he made his last- but-one move, to Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder, where he began testing his philosophical ideas in the markets. It was here that the Quantum Fund was first conceived and, eventually, born.
"In 1967 the First Eagle Fund was launched by Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder with Soros as its manager. A second fund, the Double Eagle Fund, was established in 1969 — 17 years after his first job in the City of London. Soros’s current net worth in the billions began then, with his own investment in the fund of just $250,000.
"The following year, Jimmy Rogers (author of The Investment Biker) became Soros’s partner. They set up as independent fund managers — Soros Fund Management — in 1973, taking the Double Eagle Fund with them. Renamed the Quantum Fund a few years later, the rest is history.”
Twelve years after I first read about Soros he still doesn’t know he’s my uncle but that is beside the point. Most of the people I run into in Hollywood don’t have a clue who the man is.
I just tell them to Google my column, “Soros and Me” and they say, "Ah, Oh, Ok!?" with a sort of puzzled look.
That anonymity in Hollywood may very soon change as Soros Fund Management has been in talks recently to buy a large film library from DreamWorks SKG in the billion dollar price range.
When I do finally meet Uncle George, I must tell him about our blood relations as I successfully pursue the making of the film documentary, “Soros and Me”.
Uncle Soros has been helping emerging nations to become "open societies" for more than two decades — open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce, but tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.
Surely a rich uncle like that wouldn’t judge my past as so many pious Americans have, after all, he did, through his Open Society Fund, contribute to the medical marijuana movement and he wouldn’t be crude enough to call me a former pothead in polite company.
Soros, although still harping on Bush, even though he won the bet from me and still hasn’t shown up to collect his $8 billion worth of stock that is by now totally worthless, unless of course the business plan is re-written in a sober mental state, has been saying such things as "How can we escape from the trap that the terrorists have set for us, only by recognizing that the war on terrorism cannot be won by waging war.
"We must, of course, protect our security; but we must also correct the grievances on which terrorism feeds. Crime requires police work, not military action. We can criticize our government, we can change our government and in due course, we will correct the wrong."
If only he would come see me, I can explain how he, not me, became the world’s first trillionaire on paper and had we already had a decent face to face discussion, we would not now still be in Iraq, because there is a way to dismantle the military financial media industrial complex without war, and without the insane policy decisions of the world bankers.
You might say I’m the butterfly flapping its wings in South America that caused the Tsunami in Asia, or better still, the one hand clapping not asking if I’m making any sounds. It’s all reflexive parallel universal cause and effect.
Along the lines of opening up China, Soros' drive to bring about change in China, where he admitted failure, and Myanmar, where efforts continue, brings us to the subject of Singapore.
"Obviously, Singapore does not qualify as an open society," he says. "But Singapore is prosperous and prosperity and an open society tend to go hand in hand.”
The use of libel suits and financial penalties can be a tremendous hindrance to open expression which is a common practice in Singapore as it is here in America by the Church of Scientology.
Tell that to the French Government securities regulators who slapped Soros with a $2.3 million fine for insider trading based on hearsay information from other parties, or the United States Securities and Exchange Commission which won a $1.2 million default judgment against me for helping to write several press releases on behalf of a public company which were based on fact but only days after their release became “false and misleading”.
While the U.S. Continues to become more of a closed Society, a la NSA domestic spying, CIA covert domestic operations, bank secrecy, exclusions of the public from looking into the books of the Federal Reserve Banking system, Singapore is moving in the opposite direction.
Ironically I cannot find an open enough lawyer to sue Hewlett Packard on a contingency for $70 million for entering into a fraudulent contract with the crook I hired and fired to run the publicly traded company I acquired in 2003, even though my case might be as good as gold in the bank, nor can I find anyone to sue the US government, the subject of another edition of this column.
Soros’s goals may well include a long range plan to open up China, and if Soros does get into any type of partnership with the Chinese government, he might just wind up advising them on what to do with all those US Treasury bills it keeps plowing money into, (over $2 trillion at last count) and then we might see some real tsunamis in the financial world.
Surely there is another person living in this world today who is still greater than Soros who will come along and make a trillion dollars in one day, correctly betting that the U.S. Dollar has collapsed under the burdens of a mismanaged, highly leveraged debt that will top $10 trillion by the time George W. Bush leaves office.
With all the recent rumblings in Congressional halls on imposing a 27.5% tariff on Chinese imports because Beijing will not lower the value of its “artificially high” priced currency, there seems to be a real opportunity for the international bankers to reap trillions in the coming months from currency trading.
After all, the daily volume of currency trades flowing through New York City alone is closely approaching $2 trillion.
So, I’m short the dollar, long on the Chinese Yuan, and definitely watching Soros Fund Management play with Star Energy in New York.
Copyright. Alex S. Gabor Syndicate. All Rights Reserved. First Published with permission at OpinionEditorials.com.
Obviously I lost that bet and with it all of my delusions came crashing down, winding me up on the streets of Venice, hanging out with the local Boardwalk merchants as the mysterious homeless Hungarian Penny King who was giving the street urchins 500% returns on their pennies!
I was clinging on to the last hope of becoming rich and famous, waiting for the call back from Viacom for their interview with me on the set of “What’s Your Obsession?’, which was pennies, a show that apparently never made it to the MTV crowd.
Flash forward, two years later, still penniless, saddled with millions in real debt, I am gradually climbing out of a self inflicted mud hole of deluded history and bringing myself to maintain the discipline to follow my dreams as a writer.
I have chosen my favorite rich and famous uncle George Soros as my topic in order to bless the world with my talents as an author, filmmaker and director. It will save my life to be finally able to tell George what I really think about him and to pay off that $8 billion debt I lost when George Bush got reelected.
I actually admire the man and wish he were my real uncle. Maybe he will consider adopting me after all is said and done and the fat lady sings.
Millions of Americans still think the election was stolen out of Ohio the second time, as it was the first time in Florida.
I was so under the influence of the magic spell of Mr. Soros that I took it upon myself to offer to buy the Bank of China in 2004 with stock that I tried to sell to the Chinese government through an agent I met online out of Hong Kong when they were hard at work restructuring the local banking system.
Despite remonstrances from Wall Street Journal writers who wondered who the hell I was after reading the press release about my offer, I was still hoping that I could convert that stock to cash if only I won the bet. Talk about the delusions of a narcoleptic gambler.
George Soros is now poking around and making inroads to opening up China that may just blow America away. Taiwan's largest carrier, China Airlines Ltd., recently completed its acquisition of a 25 percent stake in a mainland Chinese air cargo carrier, Yangtze River Express Airlines, a unit of China's Hainan Airlines Company.
Soros controls 14% of Hainan Airlines which announced that it will be making direct flights to New York by the end of the year; as well he owns indirectly about 7% of Jet Blue Airways, already a growing domestic US carrier out of New York.
What is Soros really up to?
While speaking to wide open ears in Singapore at the Raffles City convention centre, he held court to an audience of thousands of academics, government officials, businessmen and undergrads, enthralling them with his beliefs and vision for a global open society.
At least there he didn’t suddenly leave the stage when hecklers began calling him a tool of the Rothschild’s, or hurling insults at him as he did at UC Berkley when I paid $10 to see him speak in 2004, even though I was homeless at the time and living out of my vehicle.
Soros by the time he hit 50 had already made his wealth, yet while I am about to turn 50, still grappling with the wreckage of my past, my only wealth is my word.
I first began to admire George Soros and formally adopted him as my great Uncle in 1994 when I first read a Los Angeles Times article detailing how he made a billion dollars in one day.
I was amazed and thought, "if he could to it, then why couldn’t I", even though I was living out of the West Hollywood Homeless shelter at that time located near the corner of Santa Monica and La Brea, which was later replaced by a huge theatre and shopping center.
It was then that I first conceived of a business plan that would make me the world’s first trillionaire, but that delusion was greatly influenced by my daily use of pot back then. Thank the heavens for 19 months of sobriety.
When George Soros graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE) in the spring of 1953 he was seeking an academic career. “But his grades weren’t good enough,” according to “The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett and George Soros”, written by Mark Tier.
When he finally graduated he took a series of odd jobs until he hit upon the idea that there was money to be made in financial markets.
According to Tier, “Soros wrote a personal letter to the managing director of each of the merchant banks in the City of London. One of his few interviews was with the managing director of Lazard Frères, who gave him an appointment for the sole reason of telling him he was barking up the wrong tree trying to get a job in the City of London.
Later, Soros reported what he had been told: “Here in the City we practice what we call intelligent nepotism. That means that each managing director has a number of nephews, one of whom is intelligent, and he is going to be the next managing director. If you came from the same college as he did, you would have a chance to get a job in the firm. If you came from the same university, you may still be all right. But you’re not even from the same country!”
Pick me, pick me, I’m intelligent, and I could be an adopted nephew! Please pick me! And I am from the same country as Soros! Oh please pick me, pretty please?
Tier goes on in his book that, “Eventually, Soros did secure a job in the City with Singer & Friedlander, whose managing director was, like Soros, Hungarian. His time there was hardly illustrious, though what he was learning by doing — for example, to arbitrage gold stocks — began to make him more comfortable with a financial career. But his time there was hardly an abject failure, either.
"A relative had given him £1,000 (then $4,800) to invest on his behalf. When he left in 1956 to join F.M. Mayer in New York, he took with him $5,000, which was his share of the profits made on that original £1,000. He clearly had a natural talent for operating in the investment marketplace.
"In New York, Soros began arbitraging oil stocks — buying and selling the same securities on different international markets to profit from small price discrepancies. But he first made his mark on Wall Street as a research analyst covering European stocks, where he had enormous success until John F. Kennedy introduced the “interest equalisation tax” to “protect” the balance of payments.
"This 15 per cent tax on foreign investments brought Soros’s high-flying business in European stocks to a crashing halt. With little to do, he turned back to philosophy. In 1961 and 1962 he worked weekends and evenings on The Burden of Consciousness, a book he had begun writing while studying at the LSE.
"He did indeed complete it, but it failed to satisfy him. “There came a day when I was re-reading what I had written the day before and couldn't make sense of it,” Soros wrote later. “I now realize that I was mainly regurgitating Karl Popper’s ideas. But I haven’t given up the illusion that I have something important and original to say.”
"It was only then, at the age of 32 that Soros decided to focus his full attention on investing. In 1963 he made his last- but-one move, to Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder, where he began testing his philosophical ideas in the markets. It was here that the Quantum Fund was first conceived and, eventually, born.
"In 1967 the First Eagle Fund was launched by Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder with Soros as its manager. A second fund, the Double Eagle Fund, was established in 1969 — 17 years after his first job in the City of London. Soros’s current net worth in the billions began then, with his own investment in the fund of just $250,000.
"The following year, Jimmy Rogers (author of The Investment Biker) became Soros’s partner. They set up as independent fund managers — Soros Fund Management — in 1973, taking the Double Eagle Fund with them. Renamed the Quantum Fund a few years later, the rest is history.”
Twelve years after I first read about Soros he still doesn’t know he’s my uncle but that is beside the point. Most of the people I run into in Hollywood don’t have a clue who the man is.
I just tell them to Google my column, “Soros and Me” and they say, "Ah, Oh, Ok!?" with a sort of puzzled look.
That anonymity in Hollywood may very soon change as Soros Fund Management has been in talks recently to buy a large film library from DreamWorks SKG in the billion dollar price range.
When I do finally meet Uncle George, I must tell him about our blood relations as I successfully pursue the making of the film documentary, “Soros and Me”.
Uncle Soros has been helping emerging nations to become "open societies" for more than two decades — open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce, but tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.
Surely a rich uncle like that wouldn’t judge my past as so many pious Americans have, after all, he did, through his Open Society Fund, contribute to the medical marijuana movement and he wouldn’t be crude enough to call me a former pothead in polite company.
Soros, although still harping on Bush, even though he won the bet from me and still hasn’t shown up to collect his $8 billion worth of stock that is by now totally worthless, unless of course the business plan is re-written in a sober mental state, has been saying such things as "How can we escape from the trap that the terrorists have set for us, only by recognizing that the war on terrorism cannot be won by waging war.
"We must, of course, protect our security; but we must also correct the grievances on which terrorism feeds. Crime requires police work, not military action. We can criticize our government, we can change our government and in due course, we will correct the wrong."
If only he would come see me, I can explain how he, not me, became the world’s first trillionaire on paper and had we already had a decent face to face discussion, we would not now still be in Iraq, because there is a way to dismantle the military financial media industrial complex without war, and without the insane policy decisions of the world bankers.
You might say I’m the butterfly flapping its wings in South America that caused the Tsunami in Asia, or better still, the one hand clapping not asking if I’m making any sounds. It’s all reflexive parallel universal cause and effect.
Along the lines of opening up China, Soros' drive to bring about change in China, where he admitted failure, and Myanmar, where efforts continue, brings us to the subject of Singapore.
"Obviously, Singapore does not qualify as an open society," he says. "But Singapore is prosperous and prosperity and an open society tend to go hand in hand.”
The use of libel suits and financial penalties can be a tremendous hindrance to open expression which is a common practice in Singapore as it is here in America by the Church of Scientology.
Tell that to the French Government securities regulators who slapped Soros with a $2.3 million fine for insider trading based on hearsay information from other parties, or the United States Securities and Exchange Commission which won a $1.2 million default judgment against me for helping to write several press releases on behalf of a public company which were based on fact but only days after their release became “false and misleading”.
While the U.S. Continues to become more of a closed Society, a la NSA domestic spying, CIA covert domestic operations, bank secrecy, exclusions of the public from looking into the books of the Federal Reserve Banking system, Singapore is moving in the opposite direction.
Ironically I cannot find an open enough lawyer to sue Hewlett Packard on a contingency for $70 million for entering into a fraudulent contract with the crook I hired and fired to run the publicly traded company I acquired in 2003, even though my case might be as good as gold in the bank, nor can I find anyone to sue the US government, the subject of another edition of this column.
Soros’s goals may well include a long range plan to open up China, and if Soros does get into any type of partnership with the Chinese government, he might just wind up advising them on what to do with all those US Treasury bills it keeps plowing money into, (over $2 trillion at last count) and then we might see some real tsunamis in the financial world.
Surely there is another person living in this world today who is still greater than Soros who will come along and make a trillion dollars in one day, correctly betting that the U.S. Dollar has collapsed under the burdens of a mismanaged, highly leveraged debt that will top $10 trillion by the time George W. Bush leaves office.
With all the recent rumblings in Congressional halls on imposing a 27.5% tariff on Chinese imports because Beijing will not lower the value of its “artificially high” priced currency, there seems to be a real opportunity for the international bankers to reap trillions in the coming months from currency trading.
After all, the daily volume of currency trades flowing through New York City alone is closely approaching $2 trillion.
So, I’m short the dollar, long on the Chinese Yuan, and definitely watching Soros Fund Management play with Star Energy in New York.
Copyright. Alex S. Gabor Syndicate. All Rights Reserved. First Published with permission at OpinionEditorials.com.
