SORCERER'S APPRENTICE.

Cn January 1999, the world feared that Brazil might end up pulling all of Latin America, if not the entire world's financial markets, down along with it. The leading minds of Western and Southern finance went into overdrive to help Brazil. Working hand-in-hand with the G7, the IMF established a special rescue facility to help the country out of its doldrums. Despite all these laudable efforts, the country remained on the brink. And then, a miraculous recovery took shape virtually overnight. In a way, it was all the doing of George Soros. No, he had not intervened with his billions in shaky financial markets. Instead, a press release from the Brazilian Central Bank announced that Arminio Fraga, at 42 one of Soros's best young-Turk money managers, would resign from the fund management company to head the Brazilian central bank.

Single-handedly, this deployment of one of the sorcerer's finest apprentices calmed the markets. Investors seemed comforted by the notion that Brazil was now in safe hands. After all, who could possibly be in a position to spook the country now that the Brazilians were guided in their national financial and economic management by one of the meister spooker's best understudies? From that day onwards, the Brazilian economy responded. Recent figures show surprising growth in the second quarter. The expected major recession turned into a recovery, still fragile because of the country's political circumstances, but a recovery nonetheless. As a result, the world economy breathed a sigh of relief.

Yet, by and large, the name of George Soros does not leave a good taste in people's mouths. In Malaysia, he is, with exaggeration, reputed by vocal locals to have triggered the Asian financial crisis in the summer of 1997. In Great Britain he orchestrated the shakedown of the Bank of England in the fall of 1992, while pocketing profits of well over a billion dollars. In short, Soros's actions had hardly made him a lovable figure on the world financial stage. No, contrary what financially inexperienced people might think, the man is not a bank robber. He is a hedge fund manager or a financial artist whose successes made him not only rich, but also the stuff of legend. But, like a U.S. president toward the end of his term in office, Soros is by now more concerned about his long-term legacy than about profits.

The Grand Master himself has not made it a secret that he's tired of running the nerve-wrecking treadmill of placing risky bets on a global scale. Over time, he has turned over the reins of his investment empire to younger disciples handpicked from all four corners of the universe, while he looks to become known in other contexts. For example, he has set up a network of foundations, called the Open Society Institute. In what could be seen as an act of repentance, or at least re-compensation, he is devoting much of his time and money over the last decade to promoting freedom and democratic virtue throughout formerly suppressed Eastern Europe. For Soros, who originally hails from Hungary, it is a homecoming of sorts. The Brazilian matter, however, illustrates the most important way in which Soros is ensuring an enduring legacy in the world of international finance.

Central bankers today need to know, more than anything, how to keep financial operators from destroying their carefully calibrated economic policies. Who could do it better than those who have learned from the operators themselves? Hedge funds are now appropriate apprenticeship for being a central banker in an emerging economy - in contrast to the developed world, where central bankers move to the hedge funds when they're older to cash in on their government careers. Perhaps hedge fund experience should be considered necessary in this day and age for emerging market central bankers.

Clearly, this one episode will do more to let the legend of George Soros live on in the annals of financial history than any of his previous, money-laden intervention moves in global markets. Those may, on occasion, have earned him billions. But the deployment of one of his star disciples will earn him lasting goodwill and good memories. Not a bad way to round out a shark-like career.

Stephan-Gotz Richter is publisher of TheGlobalist.com.