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Comment by jibiki | Hacker News Reader

I'm just curious, why is Soros more likely than any other commentator to want banks' shares to decline?

He did make more than a billion dollars shorting the Bank of England...

The Bank of England is not a publicly traded corporation, so it cannot be shorted at all. It is the central bank of the United Kingdom, which functions very much like the Federal Reserve in the United States.

George Soros bet the Bank of England would have to raise interest rates by sellings short several billion pounds. When the Bank of England succumbed to reality and devalued the pound, Soros profited about 10%.

He and other serious investors profit from being rational when everyone else is doing dumb things. The idea that banks are doing dumb things today should not come as a surprise and should not be much of a hard sell.

Soros used leverage so his actual profits were vastly greater than 10%.

You are correct. I should have thought through that more clearly.

More precisely, he made about $1b on about $10b after leverage. Who knows what his leverage may have been.

Maybe he made as much as 100% return on invested capital over the week.

How come his counterparties weren't smart enough to trade the same way he did?

That's not the point.

He's questioning Soros' motives for uttering the statement, not whether the statement is correct or not.

Why are his motives more important to us than the accuracy of the statement?

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