China’s sovereign wealth fund, which last year poured US$5 billion into Morgan Stanley, is reluctant to plow more money into foreign banks until governments hash out coherent policies to cope with the global economic and financial turmoil, the fund’s head said yesterday.
The remarks by Lou Jiwei (樓繼偉), chairman of the US$200 billion China Investment Corp (CIC, 中國投資公司), represent a new blow for ailing banks that were hoping the Chinese government investment fund would use its deep pool of cash to bail them out.
Lou said that he was unwilling to invest in foreign banks amid so much turbulence and uncertainty. Confidence in financial institutions is lacking because foreign governments seem to be changing their policies every week, he said.
“Right now, we do not have the courage to invest in financial institutions,” said Lou, speaking on a panel discussion in Hong Kong at a conference organized by former US president Bill Clinton.
“We have to wait for the time when there won’t be massive collapses of financial institutions,” he said.
The Chinese government investment arm was set up to make profitable use of Beijing’s foreign reserves, which totaled US$1.9 trillion by the end of September.
Most of those funds are kept in US Treasuries and other safe but low-yielding securities. But there have been complaints about the performance of some of the fund’s higher profile investments amid the recent market turmoil.
CIC’s biggest investment to date was a US$5 billion investment in Morgan Stanley in last December — one of nine major banks that subsequently sought relief from the deepening credit crisis through the US government’s US$700 billion banking bailout. That investment gave CIC a 9.9 percent stake in the investment bank.
The Chinese sovereign wealth fund was also said by Chinese media to have invested more than US$100 million in Visa Inc’s US$19.1 billion initial public offering in March and has invested in a fund managed by JC Flowers, a US private equity firm.
Last month, the private equity firm Blackstone Group said in a regulatory filing that it has agreed to raise CIC’s ownership limit from 9.9 percent to 12.5 percent. CIC paid US$3 billion for a stake in Blackstone’s June initial public offering, but it has seen the value of that investment plunge — a major sore point for many Chinese officials and citizens.
Lou said China’s fund would help soften the bite of the ongoing global crisis by continuing to invest in wealthy countries as well as in developing nations. But he said people should not count on China to pull the world out of the economic crisis.
“China can’t save the world. It can only save itself,” he said.
Lou said China’s economy, the world’s fourth largest, is in relatively good shape, but is facing several major challenges, such as boosting domestic consumption and becoming less dependent on exports.
“This will be very difficult and requires a lot of reforms,” he said. “It might take one to two years.”
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
RSS