The FINANCIAL –Common Ties with Georgia, “Every Halloween there is no shortage of children dressed up as vampires, werewolves and witches. If, however, a child truly wanted to inspire horror in the adults handing out sweet candy treats, he or she would be better to put on a suit, tie and wing-tipped shoes, and threaten to topple the market. In this article, we’ll take a look at the frightening financial figures that caused terror on Wall Street,” an extract from the Forbes October 31 article.
Take a look at what common ties do the 5 most feared figures in Finance have with Georgia:
No. 5 – Bill Gates
Bill Gates is best known for being one of the richest men on the planet and the founder of the tech company giant, Microsoft. The thing that helped him and his company establish near-perfect dominance over the market was not a superior level of technology, but Gates’ business acumen and cutthroat competitiveness. When Microsoft exploded onto the scene with MS-DOS, Excel, Word and then Windows, many investors wondered why the profits weren't being paid out in juicy dividends. It soon became apparent that Bill Gates was building a war chest of unbelievable size.
In May 2007, the Tbilisi Marriot hosted a presentation of the Windows XP Georgian test (Beta) version. For the first time society became acquainted with Georgian Windows XP. 2 220 words and 80 000 phrases (including 355 words) were translated within the project.
Backing of popularization of the Windows XP localization project is provided by holding Georgian Industrial Group (GIG), the company which is working on the realization of investment programs in the direction of Georgia’s economical development and financing of the most significant projects.
UGT started intense negotiations with the corporation Microsoft in 2004. Strategic partnership of UGT and Microsoft and Georgia’s international rating has been a guarantee towards the success of negotiations. The Ministry of Education was actively involved in the project.
A consulting group staffed with technicians, philologists and Georgian language specialists was set up within the Georgian Windows XP localization project. With the help of a site created specifically for the Georgian Windows XP (Beta) version all interested people participated in this project.
Beyond Business
Microsoft and the British Library to Digitalize Georgian Books Online (The FINANCIAL archive October 2005)
“We do not currently have a Georgian specialist, but our Head of Caucasian section described our Georgian collections as ‘strong’ and said there was likely to be a significant number of books that would be 19th century and out-of-copyright – and therefore eligible for inclusion in the digitization project,” Ben Sanderson The British Library Press Office, told The FINANCIAL.
According to Sanderson, the British Library has around 2 000 Georgian titles (800 are described in “A Catalogue of Georgian and other Caucasian Printed Books in the British Museum” compiled by David Marshall Lang in 1962. The British Museum’s printed collections became the core of the British Library’s collection when the library was created in 1973 – a further 1 200 Georgian items have been acquired since 1962 and are available via the library’s reading rooms.)
No. 4 – George Soros
George Soros has been described as a pirate and is despised in locations as various as Thailand, Britain and Malaysia. This famous currency speculator has made a fortune breaking currencies. In breaking the Bank of England, Soros became a figure to be feared by countries trying to protect fragile currencies.
Soros is far from a numbers-only speculator. He looks in-depth at a country and tries to spot errors in valuation; political policies in particular draw his interest. Active in philanthropy focused on bringing about political change, Soros also uses his currency positions to “punish” countries whose policies are ignored in favour of positive economic data by most speculators. By pressuring these governments financially, Soros can force political changes that might never come about otherwise. Governments may fear him, but the citizens of these countries may ultimately thank him.
George’s Georgian Story
spectrezine.org- In late 2000, Shevardnadze invited George Soros – whom he had known since the 80s – to Tbilisi to set up the Open Society Georgia (an offshoot of Soros’s Open Society Institute), ‘with the stated aim of building democratic institutions and civil society.’
On that trip, Soros met Shevardnadze’s Justice Minister, Mikhail Saakashvili – who some months later, then disillusioned with Shevardnadze – quit the government & went into opposition. This initial trip by Soros was to be followed by several other visits, though his relationship with Mr. Shevardnadze had begun to sour, as evinced by Soros’s statement to a news conference in Moscow in 2002 on the subject of the coming Georgia election in 2003:
“It is necessary to mobilize civil society in order to assure free and fair elections because there are many forces that are determined to falsify or to prevent the elections being free and fair,” Mr. Soros said, adding that “This is what we did in Slovakia at the time of Meciar, in Croatia at the time of Tudjman, and in Yugoslavia at the time of Milosevic.”
No. 3 – Carl Icahn
Carl Icahn is a one-time raider who can be credited with prompting more Securities and Exchanges Commission regulation than any other individual.
Icahn was the creator of greenmailing and one of the primary reasons that disclosure rules are so strict once stock holdings creep to the level of a toehold purchase. Icahn did everything from stripping assets and forcing stock buybacks, to personally dressing down CEOs and board members.
On November 23, 2007, he added to his holdings in Exploration & Production company- Anadarko Petroleum Corp. by 200.38%. His purchase prices were between USD 48.46 and USD 53.85, with an estimated average price of USD 50.8. The impact to his portfolio due to this purchase was 10.5%. His holdings were 13,578,160 shares as of 09/30/2007.
Anadarko Petroleum Corporation engages in the acquisition, exploration, and production of oil and gas primarily in the United States, the deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico, and Algeria. Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has a market cap of USD 26.78 billion; its shares were traded at around USD 55.89 with a P/E ratio of 4.74 and P/S ratio of 2.25. The dividend yield of Anadarko Petroleum Corp. stocks is 0.6%.
Anadarko was one of the sponsors of the Georgian International Oil & Gas and Power Industry exhibition (GIOGIE) 2006 conference that was hosted by 250 delegates from 15 countries. The rest of the sponsors were: Statoil, Batumi Oil Terminal, Georgian Oil, Bank Turanalen, KazTransGas, Canargo, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Channel Energy, Consultancy Group, and Azertrans.
No. 2 – John D. Rockefeller
John D. Rockefeller may be the most terrifying figure in finance. He was the richest man in the world and still ranks as the richest man in modern history. His company, Standard Oil, controlled 90% of the American oil industry and was infamous for forcing competitors to bankruptcy and then buying their assets from their creditors. But the thing that made him truly terrifying was his absolute belief in what he was doing. Rockefeller saw cutthroat competition as a ruinous practice that benefited the consumers much less than it ultimately hurt business. Rockefeller saw greater profits and greater benefits could be achieved by the practice of “combination,” now called “economies of scale.”
wsws.org- “Until the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline is finished, oil from Azerbaijan will continue to be transported by train across the Caucasus to Batumi’s Black Sea port and then ferried across to western markets. The Rothschilds financed the building of the railroad from the eastern Caspian coast of Azerbaijan to Batumi in 1883. This made Batumi one of the very first oil ports in history and created serious competition for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil that until then had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the world’s oil industry.”
No. 1 – J.P. Morgan
J.P. Morgan was a wealthy man, but not near the scale of a Rockefeller or even a Gates. What J.P. Morgan had more of than any other person on this list was pure power. During his lifetime it was said that God owned men’s souls and J.P. Morgan owned the rest. The power that Morgan wielded owes as much to timing as to his personal attributes. Morgan was the primary banker for Wall Street, underwriting companies like General Electric and International Harvester at a time when the American economy was getting ready to explode. At the time, a bank’s reputation decided whether an issue would sell rather than the strength of the company’s financials, and Morgan’s reputation was gold.
The moment when Morgan was at his most powerful and terrifying, however, came during the Bank Panic of 1907. Morgan personally gathered all the financial and political movers at his mansion and forced them into locked-door negotiations to resolve the crises. The idea that the entire American economy relied on one aging banker to keep it afloat scared the government so badly that the Federal Reserve Bank was created to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future.
Georgian TBC Bank managed to raise a stunning USD 47 million fund from western capital markets. The transaction was achieved with the help of JP Morgan, one of world’s largest banks, and counts as TBC’s biggest international deal ever.
The deal has been made possible thanks to JP Morgan, a worldwide giant amongst banks, which serves the world’s leading corporations, financial institutions and high-income people of over 100 countries. April 30, 2007.
Conclusion
The word terrifying is apt for these men. The names Gates, Soros, Icahn, Rockefeller and Morgan all embody enough power (financial, mental and political), to inspire awe, respect and, consequently, fear. It is unlikely that they will ever inspire their own costume line, but they will forever cause chills down the spines of bankers, investors and financial figures alike. (Forbes).
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