from my understanding, it's a healthcare investors conference where investors meet companies (both public and private), esp those looking to fund raise.
that's a very incomplete view of Citizens United - the specific issue was not that it was published before an election - it was that paid for by a non-profit organization (Citizens United is a PAC). individuals are allowed to publish a movie, or view on their own w/o prohibition. Corporations and non-profits were not granted that right. Citizens United reversed that law, allowing corporations and non-profits (mostly PACs) to be able to express more political views. It's not crazy to think that organizations are not a person and therefore shouldn't be afforded rights that were intended for actual individual human beings.
A few things to note:
1. points 1-2 are often cited as to why China has been immune from prior global financial issues. IMO, we need to contextualize this. China was able to finance itself through an export-oriented economy and receive huge foreign inflows of cash from it as it became the factory to the world. This has been true for other developing economies. at some point, history shows that most large economies need to reach a better balance between exports and internal consumption (china is the 2nd largest country by GDP with 30% of world MFRU output; law of large numbers apply?)
It does seem now, that China's export economy has reached a stasis/equilibrium given a variety of factors (China labor inflation, regulations/trade wars, other economies like India, Vietnam becoming increasingly competitive vs China, and more vendors adopting China +1 sourcing strategy). You can also see this in China's more aggressive stance towards investing in Africa and LatAm. It's not to say that China's export economy crumbles, but it's likely not the same tailwind to economic growth. Typically when this happens, economies need to switch to a more consumption oriented economy (hence the Economists constant comparison to Japan)
Points 5-8 seem to ignore what actually happened with Evergrande. The new property development restrictions enacted last year point to worries that China's financial sector is exposed to something akin to a "shadow" banking system (Evergrande is both a property developer and offered financial instruments to consumers). The question is how much damage does this do to consumer balance sheets (and hence future consumption) - hard question to answer given everything we don't know about China's actual financial system (we didn't even know the ins/outs of our own system in 2008)
While i dont disagree that the Economist has been a Cassandra on China for a while, this situation seems like a potentially more difficult situation for the CCP to handle
that only addresses one side of the story - banks/credit decision makers often use market capitalization as a factor in underwriting. The easiest example of how equity prices influence credit is NFLX - their 1st big debt raise was in 2015 (2b?) when NFLX's burned 700M in cash and was pledging to be cash flow negative for the next 3+ years. Also see all the converts that a lot of recent tech IPOs have started offering
^ this guy gets it! IBM PC dominance didn't mean much when OS became the thing. And Windows PC OS dominance didn't mean much when web became the thing. Search dominance (which is one way of interacting with the web) didn't mean much when social/eCommerce (other ways) became a thing. FB missed messaging (is messenger a thing?). What are we doing here? can we just focus on figuring out digital privacy and call it a day?
if we allow that this combination of market power (search + ads + channels of distribution like youtube, android) wld lead to mass surveillance, what prevents other companies from arising and abusing this power? Other countries would hv to go along. I don't think trading Google dominance outside the US for Baidu solves anything.