Despite the widely held assumption that big money automatically favors Republican policies and politicians, the Democrats have their fair share of large donors, not the least of which is Hungarian born George Soros. And his donations have been substantial, both to political action committees and to charitable organizations. He can afford it – after all, his net worth is $24.9 billion.
Soros has made his fortune through market speculation, primarily world currencies (forex) and equities. After years in the field and earning degrees in Philosophy, he was among the first to publically discuss a market theory that explained why free markets often don’t self-regulate as would be predicted by classical economics, and that the markets instead have “moods” in which markets influence people’s decisions and those decisions, in turn, influence the markets. This ultimately leads to unsustainable phenomena of “boom and bust” cycles.
At age 86, Soros is old enough to have witnessed and remember some of the horrors of Nazi occupation. Although his family was non-practicing, their Jewish background made them targets of the regime when Germany invaded Hungary. He eventually went into hiding, pretending to be the godson of a local government employee, with whom he lived until he immigrated to England in 1947. He worked his way through school at the London School of Economics, and after a series of odd jobs, ended up with an entry level position at merchant bank Singer & Friedlander.
The rest is history. Although he had no relevant experience upon being hired (he attributes his being hired to the fact that the manager was also Hungarian), he had a knack for analyzing European equities, and soon was offered a position as an arbitrage trader at the brokerage F.M Mayer in New York.
Perhaps his biggest moment was in 1992, on what is known as Black Wednesday in the UK. Soros took a huge short position on the British pound, and turned a very quick profit of around $1 billion when the currency became devalued shortly thereafter.
