Jack Ma's Bund Finance Summit Speech

His description of the world’s ailments is quite accurate, yes. His prescription for them, a big data-based credit system, seems frustratingly Chinese. Only time will tell if his futuristic system is the right way forward though.

There is such a thing as speech ghostwriting. I'd even wager it's pretty standard for most high-level politicians and CEOs.

It works very well when the format is a unidirectional speech, but obviously breaks down in a conversation/debate.

My point here: If you want to figure out how smart Ma is, I think your reaction to how he performed in that discussion with Musk is a much stronger signal than how you perceived this speech.

The probability of this speech being heavily managed is very high, especially since the global tech/investor crowd got that wow rection after that disastrous event with Musk.

If watching his conversation with Musk left you with a negative impression of Ma's intellect, he probably said some things you didn't expect a smart person to say. But that doesn't necessarily mean he's stupid. Personally, I think he just wasn't trying to fulfill your expectations, but instead targeting a different group, as I've explained in a comment in an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006975

Well, I guess it's the effect of the wisdom words that finally enlightened you. Ooooh, the wisdom words flowed out of this rich business man, carried his lies and false claims so naturally.

The things are more clear if you knew that few days ago, the CEO of Ant Finance Xiaoming Hu comes out and said "Everybody, even beggars should be given loans. Everyone should be respected" (https://36kr.com/newsflashes/895377271796488).

You know, banks don't want to give loans to beggars, and it's for a very good reason: Because banks don't want to lose any money, money that the banks don't actually own.

Now, Ant Finance claims that they have buzzword BiGdATA to prove somebody's ability to payback, and so they can safely doing their ABS business (http://finance.ifeng.com/c/8189yYOdKfw) without cause bubbles. But, at same time, it is very reasonable for a government to rise concern about it, especially after seeing whatever shit storm has been going on since around 2008.

My point here is, everybody, richman, world leader, scumbag and good people etc, they can all make their speech sound nice and smart and reasonable, you just need 5 episodes of JCS Criminal Psychology to get yourself to understand that, deeply. So don't just listen to what people says, think what the speaker wants.

My issue with it is that it's a fancy speech and nothing he's saying is necessarily wrong. He mostly correctly bashed a bunch of strawmen to great effect. Except they have more or less nothing to do with what he actually wants, which is his ability to continue to re-securitize loans he makes until he gets to the ludicrous self-fund rate of 1.6% on the loans and offloading most of the risk to the rest of society while getting most of the gains.

Nothing he complains about are infeasible with Basel III's reserve rate of 8%. Peer to peer lending, ML analysis on spending habits etc, none of his "innovations" are inhibited by regulation. The only thing it's affecting is the profit.

I am not actually surprised.

But the Chinese government goes hard to set an example at a global level. The message must be quite different for everyone, depending on your position, just saying.

From the article:

"But I felt compelled to provide an English version of Jack Ma’s speech on October 24 at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai, because mainstream media coverage of the speech and the subsequent cancellation of Ant Group’s IPO has been lacking and simplistic."

And you linked to a mainstream media piece that is lacking and simplistic.

Sometimes i feel maybe people are just trying too hard to read between the lines, Especially when it comes to anything China related. Maybe it really is just the fact Chinese government wasn't comfortable with the asset/loans ratio that ANT is proposing?

Basically Ant would like to be seen as a technology company, rather than a finance company, because these two are under different regulation. In theory, Ant acts as a broker to loans, and it is making profit without much risk. The new regulation would have been in discussion for months. My guess is that Ant knew about this new regulation which would hurt its valuation, and decided to go for IPO before this regulation come into effect. If the new regulation halves Ant's valuation, it is really not fair to the IPO investors. it makes sense to stop the IPO.

There was tens of huge P2P lending companies went burst with tens of thousand investors losing their money and protests happened after each event. This is the reason for the new regulation. That said, Ant group is in a very different league. Alipay owns a huge share of payment market in China, the data it is collecting can cover everything you do with money, I would think Ant's loan are safe and that's why banks are buying those loans from Ant.