When a Hungarian financier called George Soros shorted the English pound 30 years ago, back in 1992, the British government fought back. It did everything it could to preserve the value of its national currency. British officials raised interest rates all the way to 15%. The Bank of England then sold $40 billion of foreign currency reserves in a desperate effort to prop up the pound.
In the end, of course, it didn't work. The Bank of England collapsed. Total cost to the population of Great Britain? Well, that's hard to measure, but it was at least 3 billion pounds. This at a time when a pound was worth nearly 2-and-a-half dollars. It's now at $1.20, which tells you a lot. The U.K. got poorer, but not George Soros. His fund made off with a billion dollars in profit — a billion dollars for creating nothing, only destroying things.
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