EFB is my own little nickname for Soros, to wit, ''everyone's favourite bogeyman''.
Now, the thing to remember about forex is that everything is a **pair** of currencies: when someone says ''I'm short the ol' dollar'', as Bill Gates rather fatuously remarked early this year, what they are saying is really, ''I sold USD and bought with the proceeds some other currency (or currencies)'', or ''I sold USD for EUR and CHF'', same thing. They've (here) made a trade in the EUR/USD and USD/CHF **pairs** of currencies.
EMR, mentioned in the first pgh of #25, is a typo (should read ERM, sorry) for the old European Rate Mechanism, the predessor to the Maastricht Agreement that ultimately led to the establishment of the Euro. Most everyone knows that, in September 1992, Soros ''broke the Bank of England'', right?
As usual, what ''everyone knows'' is incorrect. The Bank of England broke itself. Soros only made a bet that it would do so, and he was, famously, quite correct, and made somewhere between $1 and $2 bio (that's billion, in forex-speak) on the deal. If you like, I'll post the details of the how and the why of this episode (pretty good story, too).
Regarding Ms. Rockefeller's trading idea, the key factor therein is the notion of capital flows (''cap flow''). These are investment sums that flow into or out of each nation, representing the currency value of purchases/sales of businesses, purchases/sales of gov't bonds, and so forth. These figures are tracked and released each quarter by, among others, Bank of New York. If at some release date the capital flow figure (the ''number'', in #25) is well above or well below what the forex mkt expects, there can and usually will be a violent short-term move in one or another pair of ccys (abbreviation for currencies), as the traders who were wrong-footed in these pairs put their positions back into a balance that suits them.
The only other term that may be unfamiliar is ''writing OOM EUR calls''. This is a type of trade in ccy options. The trader will take this action when he believes (presumably for good reason) that a given ccy will not rise vs USD past a certain point by a certain date. As we've seen over the past 5 months, EUR has not only not risen vs USD, it has dropped fairly sharply (or, said another way, the EUR/USD pair has fallen). Thus, writing OOM EUR calls on rallies (i.e. when EUR moves upward, short-term, 200-300 pips (''poiints'', 100 pips = 1 US cent)) has been quite profitable. EUR/USD has been in a firm downward trend which, imnnho, is likely not to be reversed for some time -- US short interest rates have a ways to go yet, and ECB (wups, the European Central Bank, approx. their equivalent of the Fed) won't get its thumb out and raise Euro rates...too bad for EUR/USD, eh?)
Last March, right here, I wrote a fairly long post to the effect that A) EUR/USD would be weak going into the 29 May vote on the European ''constitution'', given that polling indicated the froggies were apt to vote it down, and B) the volatility of EUR options would increase (i.e. they would become more expensive) in the same time frame and for the same reason. This view, of course, has been well borne out by events, but no credit to me at all; this was merely shooting tunafish in a barrel. An enormous number of people, and lots and lots of capital, had a huge stake in seeing that faux-''constitution'' approved as is by the froggies, and its rejection instantly scotched a whole bunch of investment in Wonderland (my nickname for the ''Eurozone''), thereby putting downward pressure on EUR vs. essentially every major ccy in the world except Swissie (forex-speak for CHF, Swiss Franc).
I hope that this post has cleared things up for you to some extent, or, in the best case, completely. Further details at your request.
FReegards!
Er, ''predessor'' ==>> ''predecessor''. Sheesh, sorry!