>I have been meaning to ask for soem tiem what people felt Soros
>really represetns.
Himself, most of all. There's hardly a large bloc of professional speculators that he leads. He's much more educated and worldly than his colleagues, and he comes from a much more politically varied and sophisticated part of the world than most Wall Streeters do. (Of course they revere him for his success - rather like Chomsky's colleagues at MIT revere him as genius linguist. But their politics, forget about it.) A journalist I know who used to hang out with Soros pretty regularly told me that Soros thinks of himself as a "social democrat." There really aren't many other financiers who would describe themselves that way (and a lot of them probably wouldn't even know the term). He probably favors a more generous welfare state, though nothing that would interfere with property rights or chip away at his zillions. He seems genuinely concerned about repression, bellicosity, and ignorance.
His investment philosophy is based on taking contrary positions when the consensus has reached extremes. Lately he's been treating the U.S. empire as a kind of political bubble on a massive scale, and he's betting against it.
Doug