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Friday, November 6, 2020

How billionaire Jack Ma fell to earth and took Ant's mega IPO with him

 In China the regulators are not controlled by the oligarchs.

They say talk is cheap. Tell that to Jack Ma.

Corporate China's shiniest star was just days away from seeing his Ant Group list on the stock market in a record $37 billion deal, when he chose to launch a blistering public attack on the country's financial watchdogs and banks.

The regulatory system was stifling innovation and must be reformed to fuel growth, billionaire Ma told a summit in Shanghai on Oct. 24 attended by the great and the good of China's financial, regulatory and political establishment.

Chinese banks, he said, operated with a "pawnshop" mentality.

It was this speech that set off a chain of events that ultimately torpedoed the listing of Ant, the fintech titan Ma founded, according to interviews with government officials, company executives and investors. They all requested anonymity to disclose confidential details.

How billionaire Jack Ma fell to earth and took Ant's mega IPO with him


11 comments:

  1. Top of the world, ma... top of the world!

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  2. James Cagney in White Heat
    https://youtu.be/OjzKiEs_pHI

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  3. “Chinese banks, he said, operated with a "pawnshop" mentality.”

    This is figurative language based on his belief that “banks lend out the deposits!” ... same reification error we always see over and over and over...

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  4. We live in a deflationary age where production runs ahead of consumption creating a potential glut of supply unless demand is boosted. There are two ways to boost it.

    The first is private credit extension on easy terms, which is basically drawing forward future income. This is basically a way for financial firms to extract rent in the form of interest on loans.

    The second is for governments to increase demand by transfer payments by issuing currency, eliminating rent extraction and rent-seeking on the part of firms. This also decreases risk, including system risk, in the financial system. Government will never let too big to fail financial firms go under, so in the end, the government pays the bill, including interest anyway.

    The Chinese government may understand this. It's blazingly obvious.

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  5. “Government will never let too big to fail financial firms go under,“

    They never “go under”.... all that ever happens is govt monetary or fiscal policy puts depositories into violation of some other part of the government’s regulations...

    This is your Darwin bias here again.., “things happen by themselves!.”... nothing happens “by itself”....

    We’re doing all of this..,

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  6. Do you think depositories have evolved from the apes by random chance mutation?

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  7. Hoarding behavior is an evolutionary trait.
    Middens are an effect of animal behavior on their environment.

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  8. Tom, do you think that Morse Code evolved from the English alphabet and decimal numbers by random chance mutation?

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  9. Here Tom I think ASCII must have evolved from predecessor characters by random chance:

    http://www.asciitable.com/

    “ ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character ”

    Did this evolve by random chance mutation? Copying errors?

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  10. I have many “out of money!” friends on the right who have no idea what Austrian Economics is...

    Matt, you need to study up on biology. This has zero zip to do with evolutionary theory, which is about speciation. Natural selection occurs through gene mutation.

    Try Masatoshi Nei, Masafumi Nozawa, Roles of Mutation and Selection in Speciation: From Hugo de Vries to the Modern Genomic Era Genome Biology and Evolution, Volume 3, 2011, Pages 812–829


    ReplyDelete