THE irony is breathtaking. At the request of a quixotic Spanish magistrate, acting way beyond his jurisdiction, Tony Blair’s British Labour Party arrested Chile’s General Pinochet last October, on very suspect legal grounds: and, as this is written, is still holding him. Pinochet’s crime? At a pretty desperate moment in his country’s history, he and his army stepped in and prevented Chile sliding into Cuban-type Marxism.

Yet, at the very same time, another man – one worse by far than Hitler ever was – also sits in London, a welcome and honoured British guest. A man who has changed the course of our future history, who has set the global economy back by 15 or 20 years, who has deliberately and ruthlessly ruined national economies around the world, thrown tens of millions of workers on the scrap-heap, inflicted the maximum possible damage on the poorest of the poor. Worse, by his pernicious machinations, has returned many countries to the communist yoke.

He is? Who else but the multi-billionaire currency speculator, George Soros, the Superman, the very Croesus, among currency speculators.

Soros has just written a new book: The Crisis of Global Capitalism. Here he bites the corrupt hand that has so enriched him. Without regulation and morality, he warns, global markets will self-destruct. He is now publicly worried about global depression and the great US bear market. His volte face came after he himself suffered heavy losses in a market he had himself rigged in Russia last year.

The book, though often incomprehensible, nevertheless makes some sound suggestions on how to regulate the markets. Unfortunately, he seems to overlook the small fact that it has been rapacious and predatory currency speculators such as himself, parasites with a callous disregard for the fate of humanity, who helped bring the global economy to its present point of near-collapse. Soros himself has perhaps been the most explosive force in the ongoing meltdown of the currency markets.

the world at dirt-cheap prices. What Soros always leaves behind is collapsed local markets and the national ruin of financial investors.

Going through his voluminous files, you note that the media frequently refer to him as "The Man Who Broke The Bank of England." That goes back to September 1992, to his fabled attack on the British £ and the Italian lira, wrecking the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM): in the process pocketing US$1 billion, probably the first time in history one man has made $1 billion in a single day.

Could a single man break the Bank of England? I put that question to a number of overseas economists. Their reply: "The idea that a single man, even one with investment funds in excess of $10 billion, could ‘break the £’ is absurd. In normal circumstances, the combined power of the Anglo/American central banks could easily destroy any outsider who dared launch such an attack."

Okay. Accepting that the "lone financier" scenario, like the mythical "lone assassin," is nonsense, how were the British set up? "Obviously, it required institutions far more powerful than Soros: the Western central banks, banking families such as the Rothschilds, Warburgs and Rockefellers. It is now widely accepted that the Soros attack on the £ and the lira was an inside job, done in collaboration with the US Federal Reserve, the Roths-childs and a handful of major US banks: the biggest Citicorp, JP Morgan, Bankers Trust, BankAmerica, Chemical Bank, Chase Manhattan and First Chicago. Most likely, the Fed was using Soros to carry out activities that it dare not carry out in its own name. The Fed was certainly in a position to shut Soros down if it so wished."

According to William Engdahl, the German author respected for his meticulous research into problem financial areas and the shenanigans of those seeking to mandate a new world order, the New York Federal Reserve provides Soros with information on the condition and strategies of other central banks, allowing him more precisely to attack his targets. But the Fed is not alone.