George Soros

Background

George Soros was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930. As a teenager, he survived the World War II Nazi and Russian occupations. After graduating from the London School of Economics, he moved to New York where he became one of the world’s most successful financial traders. Soros amassed billions by founding and managing an investment fund, the Quantum Fund. Today, he is chairman of the Open Society Institute (OSI). The OSI is a network of foundations dedicated to building the institutions and infrastructure of open societies by developing programs in civil society, education, media, public health, human rights, as well as social, legal, and economic reform. OSI is a nonpartisan, nonpolitical group, which in the last decade has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S. to support human rights, access to justice, education, palliative care, professionalism in law and medicine, and expansion of the democratic process to everyone. Besides a financier and a philanthropist of historic proportions, Soros is a self described philosopher and the author of nine books, most recently Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States: Essays (2012). His other books include The Soros Lectures: At the Central European University (2010); The Crash of 2008 and What it Means: The New Paradigm for Finance Markets (2009); The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of The War on Terror (2006). This past speaker page shares the entire evening, a town hall Q&A session with Progressive Forum president Randall Morton and the audience.