Just in case you've heard that "enigmatic financier, liberal philanthropist" George Soros has shuffled off this mortal coil, let's be clear. He is alive. Someone, somewhere at Reuters accidentally did something that pushed a pre-written obituary live onto the news service website.
It happens. Remember when the denizens of Fark.com uncovered some obituaries that CNN had inadvertently left publicly accessible? Here is Dick Cheney's. Here is the one for "lifeguard, movie star, athlete" Fidel Castro. Bloomberg accidentally reported Steve Jobs' death more than three years before he actually died in 2011.
The people at Reuters are very sorry. A statement on Reuters website reads:
Reuters erroneously published an advance obituary of financier and philanthropist George Soros. A spokesman for Soros said that the New York-based financier is alive and well. Reuters regrets the error.
Here's the Reuters obit:
Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys quips:
It will be interesting if Soros likes the way writer Todd Eastham covered his life.
He was known as "the man who broke the Bank of England" for selling short the British pound in 1992 and helping force the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which devalued the pound and earned Soros more than $1 billion.
And his Soros Fund Management was widely blamed for helping trigger the Asian financial crisis of 1997, by selling short the Thai baht and Malaysian ringgit.
"Subsequently, Prime Minister Mahatir of Malaysia accused me of causing the crisis, a wholly unfounded accusation," Soros wrote in The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered," in 1998.
"We were not sellers of the currency during or several months before the crisis; on the contrary ... we were purchasing ringgits to realize profits on our earlier speculation."
Still, economist Paul Krugman was one of many observers who accused Soros of helping trigger the crisis.
In 1999, Krugman wrote that "nobody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fund and profit."
Still, Soros has written extensively on the folly of what he has called free market "fundamentalism," the belief of many conservative economists that markets will correct themselves with no need for government intervention.
In Soros' view, markets and investors are subject to "mood" swings, or a prevailing positive or negative bias which can be exploited by savvy investors but which inevitably lead to damaging market bubbles and boom/bust cycles.
An enigma, wrapped in intellect, contradiction and money.
Well, this gives Eastham a chance to rewrite that "An enigma, wrapped et cetera..." line, if nothing else.
At any rate, if there was ever a time for Reuters to accidentally push a premature obituary live, you could do a lot worse than this week, because alongside the struggles of CNN and the New York Post, it's barely a blip. You can read the obit here, while it lasts.
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]