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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

I also saw that 3B to 300B leverage mentioned in the FT and I was surprised that it didn’t get picked up by the non-economics-related media, they all insist on “Chinese government bad because it didn’t let China’s most successful entrepreneur do his thing”.

We’re talking about a leverage ratio of 100, that’s a crazy figure, if I’m not mistaken Lehman’s leverage ratio when it folded was of “only” 30.

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According to https://youtu.be/HnCBbiCetSg?t=569, the S-1 equivalent filing of the IPO showed Ant itself putting up 1.68% of its own money towards its lendings. That's way more leverage than the 8% mandated in Basel III.

It's also worth mentioning that Ant securitized its loans, creating a CDO-like structure. Pretty risky stuff, per my limited knowledge on finance.

Either way is a failure for the CCP: it looks bad for letting the offering get this far, or it looks bad to future entrepreneurs for blocking it.

It is indeed a failure letting it go this far without enforcing regulations.

That being said, this mode of failure is ten thousand times better than having the bank fail a few years down the line, so it's clearly by far the better choice.

This should be a wake-up call to the CCP to reduce their cronyism with the billionaire class, but I'm not sure they will take heed.

It's not even cronyism, it's out and out negligence. The ruling class in China is too busy jockeying for position in the plenums to be bothered to enforce the law and rein in billionaires that are running rampant through the Chinese economy. (Which law enforcement is your job by the way. Your job is not impressing your cadre.) These days the business class literally has to be doing something this outrageous to draw any of Beijing's attention.

What will happen is that the rats will scatter and hide for a while until the ruling class goes back to power hunting. At which point they will come back out and begin engaging in similar outlandish behavior while trying not to wake the tiger.

Well, seems like the US is even more negligible, they let the whole financial system collapse before doing anything about it. It saddens me that a democratic regime became comparatively as corrupt as a totalitarian regime. We cannot let the idea of democracy die because of short sightedness of corrupt business and political leaders.

Maybe Ma's speech and the IPO was outrageous enough to rise eyebrows and trigger regulatory action.

in China, these draft regulations goes through many rounds of discussions with government regulators, law makers, and industry stakeholders. There is no way the regulator just popped these out of blue. What extremely likely happened Jack ma, other executives, banks have been discussing and debating about this for a while. Since 2019 Ant has tried to claim they are technology company and they make technology to improve financial services, and they shouldn't be regulated as banks. I tend to think that Ant's approach with big data and having more data on the borrowers' spending habits do allow them to mitigate risks. But on the other hand, the leverage is still very risky. It can be said that an algorithm cant predict everything that goes in the future. What if a black swan event like COVID19 happened and the macro economics goes to shit in a sudden and all your consumers can't pay back the credit. Also keep in mind that a lot of Ant' borrowers are individuals, young adults, and uses it like credit cards. But unlike the US, China doesn't have strong credit score system. And taking credit on Ant doesn't require strict employment vetting, or asking if you own a house that you get when you apply for a credit card in the US. I think COVID19 and the sudden economy collapse also made the regulators realize how much danger there could be and compelled them to push out the rules.

Regulator's point of view is safety by design. Ant can fuck up something like the risk management process and still won't go bankrupt and take the financial sector with it if there is sudden adverse event. Jack Ma thinks its about innovation and he and his company alone can mitigate the risks and the society and the government should just trust them to be the vanguard.

So Jack Ma has irreconcilable views with the government regulators. And he came out to present his views in that meeting. Its not that government saw his comments as challenge the government's authority or something. The regulators would have pushed out the new changes even if he didn't say anything.

I don't think it is a case of the CCP stopping all entrepreneurs, but a case of them choosing which companies succeed and which fails.

Are you referring to something specific?

This is pretty clearly the CCP intervening in the economy in order to stabilize it and avoid a financial crisis. I don't think this counts as picking winners and losers. I'm not sure that reclassifying something that is clearly a bank as a bank then enforcing the international agreements it would be bound too is picking winners and losers, it's just regulation.

The issue is moreso that Ma seemed to somehow have captured the regulation to delay this, and only now, with the huge attention, was the regulation enforced.

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