Soros didn't crash the pond sterling (a myth that Soros himself probably helps to spread, but the reality is a lot less dramatic) - the Bank of England was trying to defend the ERM when the position was simply indefensible. It was a game of chickens to see how long and how much the BoE was willing to stay and spend to defend the ERM. Well, in the end Soros won that game and the Sterling broke with ERM and floated. Yeh, Soros made some nice money off the deal but it's not anything close to breaking any national monetary system or national economy.
Same story on Malaysia Ringgit. It was at an artificial untenable position when Soros exploited that. Again, Malaysian politicians made a big deal of western foreigner attacking the value of the Ringgit (mostly for internal Malaysian populist consumption) but the reality was it was going to happen sooner or later.
In both cases, the amount involved - while in the billions, were still tiny when taken in the context of national and global economy scale, even more true today,
And in the end, one can argue both the British and Malaysian economies were better off for it in the long run.
I never indicated I was speaking of theMalay incident. I for one am always leery of the leverage available to speculators, and let’s face it, money is a commodity bought and sold with very little cash down.
Hell, if some anonymous trader could accidentally ruin the Bank of Scotland, how much more damage can an unscrupulous billionaire do purposefully?