Mentalist, on 27 February 2017 - 06:03 PM, said:
Re: the Atlantic article- yeah, that sounds eerily like back home. And yeah, corruption is subtle- it takes about 20 years to get the people used to the culture of cronyism everywhere- and it's incredibly hard to go back after.
So, I'm not exactly familiar with the Asian Financial Crisis; so I can't really comment on that particular incident.
However, I am familiar with what Soros does. What he does is trade foreign currencies on the FOREX market. That's it. The guy is stupid rich and his trades carry a ridiculous amount of weight (meaning if he starts shorting the Rial with all his wealth the Iranian currencies is probably going to plunge like crazy, for a week).
But his wealth is nothing when compared to the wealth of UK or any other industrialized country. If the fundamentals of an economy are OK (if the economy is strong and the country's central bank has not done something stupid), George Soros cannot do shit. He makes money when he realizes that a central bank (like BoE) has a financial policy that is ... misguided. He starts buying the currency of that particular country over several months in the hopes of riding the wave down by selling first.
He can't destabilize anywhere with a halfway competent central bank.