Normally, investors rush into Treasurys at a whiff of economic chaos but now they are selling them as not even the lure of higher interest payments on the bonds is getting them to buy. The freak development has experts worried that big banks, funds and traders are losing faith in America as a good place to store their money.
“The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven,” said George Cipolloni, a fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”
That could be bad news for consumers in need of a loan — and for President Donald Trump, who had hoped his tariff pause earlier this week would restore confidence in the markets.
After the fall of the USSR he was a major funding source for anti-corruption and pro-democracy efforts that disempowered Russian interests in several countries. White supremacists sharing Russian propaganda back then is where the conspiracy theory started, at least in the US.
His charities helped a lot of liberal politicians in Eastern bloc states start their careers by providing education and funding.
Including one Viktor Orbán.
That’s not really on him personally though, as much as I can’t stand Orbán. Presumably some of those other people went on to become doctors, teachers and so on as well.
Yeah, sure, Orbán was a really bad hire, he was an opportunistic megalomaniac way back then. One of his classmates described him getting sad upon learning that only US-born citizens can be nominated for POTUS, as he felt bad about any limit being put on his ambition.
The grants were specifically for politicians, there was no shortage of doctors or teachers relatively speaking back then, that is a more recent development.
But back to the topic, it is very hard to build democracy in a country where previously there was no real history of it, and it is especially hard to do it from across the pond. I am not blaming Soros for Orbán, but I do wonder how his other protegés turned out.