Winston Churchill

Afficionados of Britain's more recent currency crises will enjoy this: aside from winning world wars Mr. Churchill had amazing market-timing skills.

Galbraith writes:
In 1925, under the aegis of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Winston Churchill, Britain returned to the gold standard at the old or pre-World War I relationship between gold, dollars, and the pound. There is no doubt Churchill was more impressed by the grandeur of the traditional, or $4.86, pound than by the more subtle consequences of overvaluation, which he is widely assumed not to have understood. The consequences, nonetheless, were real and severe. Customers of Britain had now to use these costly pounds to buy goods at prices that still reflected wartime inflation. Britain was, accordingly, an unattractive place for foreigners to buy. For the same reason it was an easy place in which to sell.

Like a kind of Zelig who specialized in financial disasters, Mr. Churchill also appears front and center in the narrative on October 24,1929 (aka Black Thursday):
Rumor after rumor swept Wall Street...Stocks were now selling for nothing. The Chicago and Buffalo exchanges had closed. A suicide wave was in progress, and eleven well-known speculators had already killed themselves.
At twelve-thirty the officials of the New York Stock Exchange closed the visitors gallery on the wild scenes below. One of the visitors who had just departed was showing his remarkable ability to be on hand with history. He was the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Winston Churchill.


Gentlemutt:
Whatever his deficiencies as a market-timer, to Mr. Churchill are attributed numerous great quotations, some of them accurate. Click here for a few chuckles:
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=388