A colleague of George Soros and advisor to Lord Rothschild, he also anticipated the 1987 stockmarket crash, while delivering an annual return of 15 percent for over 35 years while he ran his own fund.
Baron Nils Otto von Taube was born on 25 July 1928 to Valerie Olga Doreen Girard de Soucanton, who was the daughter of William Girard de Soucanton, the Honorary British consul in Reval, owner of trading company Thomas Clayhills and Son and Beatrice Carr,[1][2] and an upper-class Baltic German Swedish father Baron Axel von Taube, a member of baronial Taube af Karlö introduced at the House of Knights in Stockholm, his family were resettled to Reichsgau Wartheland in 1939 as part of the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact requiring the resettlement of ethnic Germans from Estonia and Latvia.
Taube moved to London in 1946 to study Chemistry, but with family to support he left for the City in 1948, joining Kitcat & Aitken as an office junior.
He helped run the Soros Open Estonia Foundation, became an adviser to an Estonian cabinet committee overseeing state investment, and was a member of the prime minister's research and development council.
When asked recently if he was predicting a crash he replied: "I can't say I'm not" - and he described the present crisis as being "a cross between 1987 and the early 70s, when the market disintegrated".