Reuters temporarily kills off financier

George Soros is alive and well — despite being killed off for a good 30 minutes on Thursday evening by international news agency Reuters.

Someone at the 162-year-old renowned news agency accidentally switched the publish button and transmitted a less-than-flattering obituary for the billionaire financier.

It was complete bar dummy text for the place and time of his future death.

The obituary read as follows: “George Soros, who died XXX age age XXX, was a predatory and hugely successful financier and investor, who argued paradoxically for years against the same sort of free- wheeling capitalism that made him billions.”

The 1,122-word obituary went on to add: “He was known as ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ for selling short the British pound in 1992.

“His Soros Fund Management was widely blamed for helping trigger the Asian financial crisis of 1997,” reads the third paragraph. The rest of the obit is similarly unsparing: that he wishes to regulate the same markets from which he handsomely profited.

Slate magazine called it “a remarkably ungenerous assessment” of Soros’s life.

Reuters said in a statement: “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.”

In 2003, CNN was left red-faced after obituaries it prepared were temporarily accessible to members of the public.

CNN had prepared files on Vice President Dick Cheney and Ronald Reagan. CNN also had files on “lifeguard, movie star, athlete” Fidel Castro, Bob Hope, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, and Gerald Ford.

And Bloomberg has been there too — the news agency’s obituary for Steve Jobs became public three years before the Apple founder actually died.