When Britain fell so spectacularly from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the nation needed someone to blame. Aside from the obvious targets in the Tory government, a darker arch-villain was needed. George Soros fitted the bill perfectly.
Then a little-known financier whose fame stretched no further than the City, he was soon to become a household name as "The man who broke the Bank of England".
Mr Soros, 71, was born in Hungary but emigrated to Britain when he was 17, after the end of the Second World War.
He studied philosophy at the London School of Economics with Karl Popper, whose views on the need for open, tolerant and market-driven societies as a precursor of economic growth he adopted as his own.
Mr Soros joined Singer and Friedlander, London bankers, before moving to Wall Street to continue his financial career in 1956. He later set up the now famous Quantum Fund as one of the world's first hedge funds. It took money from rich individuals and invested in risky but potentially highly profitable international deals.
It did very well out of the collapse of fixed exchange rates in the 1970s and the deregulation of global capital markets. By 1980, Soros himself was worth more than £16.5 million and his fund £67 million. The stage was set for his intervention in the ERM.
As early as spring 1992, Mr Soros had decided that the pound would have to be devalued because it had been pushed into the ERM at too high a rate.
He knew that the Bundesbank favoured a devaluation of both sterling and the Italian lira and believed it would have to happen because of the disastrous impact that high British interest rates were having on asset prices.
Mr Soros spent the next few months building up a position from which he would profit from that devalutaion. He borrowed sterling heavily, reportedly to the tune of £6.5 billion, and converted that into a mixture of Deutschmarks and French francs.
On Black Wednesday, Mr Soros's bet paid off. In the following days, he unwound his positions, paying back his original borrowings and ending with a profit of around £1 billion. As a parallel play, Mr Soros bought as much as £350 million of British shares at the same time, gambling that equities often rise after a currency devalues.
He admitted that his actions had benefited no one but himself and, at the time, claimed that the only thing that could save Britain was a common single currency - a view he continues to hold. Mr Soros has since proved that he can lose heavily, too.
The 1987 crash cost him £530 million when he bet that the Tokyo stock market would be the first to go. He remains hugely wealthy and a believer in market deregulation.
He is rumoured to have given away almost £200 million, partly through his Soros Foundation to support democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe.
James Quinn
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