La reparación integral a la víctima como consecuencia de la aplicación del principio de oportunidad

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Yet for George Soros, philosophy would serve just that purpose. In time, he would go from the abstract to the practical; he would develop theories of knowledge, of how and why people think in certain ways, and from those theories he would spin new theories about the way the

nancial markets functioned.

Later in life, Soros constantly cited Professor Popper as the source of his inspiration for his philanthropic efforts to promote open soci-eties in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He skipped over the contribution Popper made, however inadvertently, in helping Soros to fashion the theories he would use to amass a fortune on Wall Street.

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But in the meantime, there was no fortune. Being impecunious made for embarrassing, awkward moments. But George Soros felt he had no choice. In need of nancial assistance for his studies, he approached the Jewish Board of Guardians. The board turned him down, explain-ing that it did not provide aid to students, only to the gainfully employed. The distinction made no sense to young Soros.

Then, during one Christmas vacation, while working as a railway porter on the night shift, George broke his leg. Again, he needed money. This time he had a job working for the railroad. Surely, he could qualify now. “This is the occasion to get money out of those bas-tards, I decided.”

Returning to the board, he decided to offer up a neat piece of c-tion. He informed it that he was in a predicament: He had broken his leg, but since he was working illegally, he was not eligible for National Assistance. In fact, he was still a student. The board grudgingly agreed to give him some aid. To collect the funds, he was forced, while on crutches, to climb three ights of stairs.

In time, however, the board stopped Soros’s funding. So he wrote a “heartrending” letter to the board, noting that, while he would not starve, it hurt him that this was how one Jew treated another needy one.The answer came by return mail.

George’s letter had the desired effect. His weekly allowance was reinstated-and best of all the funds would now be sent to him by mail,

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ending his arduous visits to the ofce. He happily took the money, but, still steaming from the earlier affront, waited some time after the cast had been removed from his leg-he was hitchhiking in south-ern France-before informing the board that it could stop sending the money. The Board of Guardians’ treatment of him made Soros bitter about all charities long afterwards, and he had to overcome “consider-able reservations” before setting up his own philanthropic program in the late 1970s.

The intellectual stimulation at the LSE helped Soros overcome some of his loneliness. He was still poor, but he seemed to be enjoying him-self more. During one summer break from his studies, he found work as an attendant at an indoor swimming pool in one of London’s poorer quarters. Few swimmers showed up, allowing Soros plenty of time to visit the huge public library next door. He spent a good part of the summer, therefore, reading books, caught up in the world of ideas. He later described the time as the “best summer” of his life. His profes-sional goals were still unformed. But he enjoyed being engaged in the world of ideas, and he liked writing. Perhaps he might become a social philosopher or a journalist. He was still not sure.

He could easily imagine himself remaining at LSE and becoming an academic, perhaps a philosopher like Karl Popper. How wonder-ful it would be if he could stretch his mind as Popper had, and above all else present the world with some major insight, “like Freud or Ein-stein.“ On other occasions, he dreamed of becoming a new John May-nard Keynes, of scaling the same heights as an economic thinker as the world-famous British economist.

It was the beginning of George Soros’s striving for intellectual achievement that would be one of the major themes of his life and career.

Unfortunately, Soros’s grades were not good enough, and his aca-demic pretensions seemed to founder. In late 1952 and early 1953, he wrestled with a host of philosophical questions. He was particularly interested in the gap between perception and reality. At some point, he came up with what he thought was a rather remarkable intellectual discovery: “I came to the conclusion that basically all our views of the world are somehow awed or distorted, and then I concentrate on the importance of this distortion in shaping events.“

He began writing a short book that he entitled The Burden of Con-sciousness. In it, he formulated notions of open and closed societies.

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Dissatised with what he had written, he put the manuscript down.

Over the next decade, he sought to rework the text but eventually abandoned the effort when he “could not make head or tail of what I had written the day before.”

This was not a good sign, and Soros knew it. It was unlikely he would become a professor. Soros linked his failure to nish the book with his decision to forgo the study of philosophy in favor of the pur-suit of money.

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However much Soros wanted to teach, it was clear to him that he needed to make a living-and fast. He was 22 years old, and, while he longed to make some great contribution to human knowledge, he had to eat. However, a degree in economics qualied him for little. He took whatever job he could nd, the rst as a handbag salesman in Black-pool, the coastal resort in northern England.

He had difculty selling. To attract customers, he had to convince people early on that he was no different from them-tough for a for-eigner, conversing in heavily accented English. It bothered him also to sell wholesale goods to shopkeepers who probably did not need them.

Once, he made such a sale to a small shopkeeper whose shop was clut-tered with unsold merchandise. This man needs my handbags like he needs a hole in the head, Soros thought to himself. Suppressing such thoughts, he convinced himself that he could not let his personal feel-ings surface. He sold the man the wares, but the guilt did not leave him quickly.

It could be argued that LSE was the perfect training ground for someone like Soros who would eventually take up a career as an inves-tor. Yet, Soros had learned nothing at the school about the nancial markets, barely knowing they existed. Upon graduation, he sensed there was good money to be made in investing. Needing a foot in the door of a London investment bank, he drafted a letter to all the invest-ment banks in the city, hoping his luck would change. When Singer &

Friedlander offered him a job as a trainee, he happily accepted.

Here was a rm with a ourishing stock market operation.

Enthralled, he became a trader specializing in gold-stock arbitrage, trying to take advantage of price discrepancies in the different

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kets. Even if he had not been terribly successful-and the evidence sug-gested that he was not-he felt comfortable in this world, discovering the thrill of buying and selling in the markets. It would have been more stimulating perhaps to have become a social philosopher or a journalist. But he needed to make a living. Here the prospects seemed good. Soros found this world more and more appealing.

The general estimate of George Soros’s London passage has him largely a failure. Even Soros does not dispute that. He has one defender in Edgar Astaire, the London stockbroker who knew Soros then and has since become his London partner: “He was never establishment.

He was only 25 and 26 years old. You couldn’t do anything [in that business]. Young men were not allowed to do anything.”

Whatever the case, in 1956, the young investment banker believed that it was time to move on.

To New York City.

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I

n leaving for New York, George Soros acknowledged to himself once and for all that he was serious about a career in nance.

The dream of becoming a philosopher would have to remain... a dream.

Moving to New York automatically gave him a competitive advan-tage over his colleagues. Even though he did not set the world on re in London, he had acquired knowledge of European nancial markets.

While experts on that subject were a dime a dozen in London, the people on Wall Street had little experience or understanding of Euro-pean markets. From the moment he arrived in the United States, Soros was tagged as an expert in the eld.

Soros made the journey to New York with $5,000 to his name. A relative had given him 1,000 British pounds and asked him to invest the sum on his behalf. The $5,000 represented Soros’s share of the prof-its from that investment.

That same year, 1956, Tivadar and Elizabeth Soros left Hungary, joining their two sons in the United States. Tivadar opened an espresso stand on Coney Island. It could not have been a pleasant experience for the Great Survivor. The small business failed, and Tivadar retired.

(In the early 1960s Tivadar developed cancer. His father was so poor that George Soros had to nd a surgeon who would handle the case gratis.)

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Soon after arriving in the United States, Soros found work through a London colleague. One phone call to one of the partners at F. M.

Mayer on Soros’s behalf and Soros was an arbitrageur. Though arbi-trage grew into one of the hottest nancial games of the 1980s, three decades earlier it was pretty dull. No one staked out large investment

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