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Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

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Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They send their children overseas to overpriced universities, and are allowed to justify buying luxury cars, and other school related expenses. I don’t think the mentality on these expenses is getting a 1:1 conversion rate, but that money is meant to be spent. There’s various ways they can fund their children’s business ventures (passion projects) overseas without expecting it to ever turn a profit. With the nepotism…

> They send their children overseas to overpriced universities, and are allowed to justify buying luxury cars, and other school related expenses. And real estate.

Like that one Chinese student buying a $31M house in Vancouver!

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#112

Have been hearing these kind of "capital flight" stories for decade plus now somehow big financial institutions keep pushing more FDI into China. See i'm not an economist but you can't that sounds a bit counter intuitive too me. One story says China has capital flight and you have other stories talking about more and more Foreign directed investment into China.

Rich Chinese are getting their money out of the country, because if their money is in China, they don't really own it. The CCP could take it any day and there would be nothing they could do about it. And then there is Western capital, used to rule of law and personal property. They don't see that reality as a realistic threat. So they keep pumping money into China. It will work. Until it doesn't. And then the CCP wil…

>because if their money is in China, they don't really own it

The same can be said about money moved to the West, just with a different risk profile. As the Russian situation has shown, your property can be creatively taken away if your country of origin pisses off the US too much.

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#113
Nation-state controls over capital inflows and outflows are not necessarily a bad idea, and were an alternative system proposed in the 1970s. Of course, the USA instead championed neoliberal trade policies that largely eliminated such controls, relying instead on petrodollar recycling to manage the balance-of-payments issues. It's worth taking a look at conditions in 1978 for context:

https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/30/archives/the-nation-the-i...

> "It is not just the capital outflow from the United States that has so hurt the dollar. Once, American capital outflow abroad was largely offSet by a surplus in trade. But the United States, has now slipped into a deficit in trade as well as payments, both because of its huge oil bills ($48 billion last year alone) and a weakening of exports, as other countries have grown more slowly and so have been importing less..."

> "Furthermore, capital flows are now even more important than trade flows. The meeting of OPEC in Saudi Arabia that starts Saturday, aimed at revaluing the oil‐producing countries’ dollar holdings, could have an even bigger impact on the dollar than the oil trade itself. Government holdings of the oil exporting countries total over $60 billion in monetary rerserves. Private holdings are unknown. Despite all the dollars that have flowed out, the United States is still trying to play the role of banker to the world, still providing the key currency for the world monetary system..."

The complexities of petrodollar recycling - weapons deals, aid programs, secretive Wall Street foreign investment funds, etc. - are generally not a subject of discussion in the western corporate media, but here's a good overview from 1985:

"Petro-Dollar Recycling: Imports, Arms, Investment and Aid" (1985), Gerner https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/41857746

It's worth noting also that current USA-Russia tensions really began in 2003 when Putin largely rejected membership in the petrodollar recycling system, and similar issues arose with Venezuela and later, Libya.

Chinese oil imports are on the order of $175 billion per year, so they're apparently facing the same problem the US did in the 1970s. However, they're also building out renewable capacity faster than any other nation, which is the best way to escape fossil fuel dependency.

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bought fully into the Russian propaganda then… you’d do well to listen to pretty much any interview by Fiona Hill and you’d quickly realise there’s nothing the US wants less than borders starting to be changed by wars; there are so many disputed lines that it could lead to conflicts all over the world. China starting a proxy war with the US and Europe is going to be extremely bad for business.

I’m think you’re confusing China with the US. Compared to the CCP, we don’t have border disputes like the melee death clashes in the mountains vs India, past border clashes with Russia, and the border spats with nearly every Asian country in the South China Sea

[deleted]

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#115
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk is that China becomes a pariah to the West, which much of their economic system depends on.

The US depends on China to a level where I'd say they own us, not the other way around. They play a large part in making almost every product we use in the US, without trade with them we're screwed.

US/China trade is a surprisingly small. Canada, Mexico, China, the EU are all roughly equivalent plus a long tail of every other country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

Where China has an oversized impact is our trade deficit and consumer goods which makes them seem vastly more important than they are. However, that’s also the most flexible with south east asia replacing Chinese manufacturing as Chinese workers become more expensive.

Our trade deficit with China isn’t as bad as it seems because we export goods to countries China then imports from. Hong Kong for example is a 25.8B trade surplus and really should be included in Chinese trade numbers.

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#116
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy crypto in China, sell it abroad. At least that was one approach. Note if you do it fairly quickly it doesn't matter what the value of the crypto is, just the liquidity. Another way is 'business' investments in other SE Asian countries, that then get liquidated and moved further abroad. China does a lot of business with S. Korea for example. If you have an export company, and China exports a lot, you can hold a po…

> Buy crypto in China, sell it abroad. I heard this many times and I can’t figure out how it works. Crypto is sortof banned in China for a while for this reason and yet it’s still a route to take money out of China. But how? Who is going to give you crypto for yen in China?

You buy a large number of ASIC crypto miners in China.

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#117

Can China prop up its economy forever? There has been some alarming articles about China's economy the past year, particularly that the real estate market, exports, and other issues are putting the company into a very terrible financial situation. However, the government in China IS the bank. They can declare a company solvent that is not, bailout anyone and everyone, shut down companies at will, etc. In such a non-m…

I've seen this idea expressed on HN a few times recently. I don't get it. The mechanics are really not that different from any other country. If you print billions to bail out entities you get rapid inflation. The big things at risk are real estate prices and local governments. You can't easily wave this away regardless of your level of control.

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#118
post #37

Are the increasingly tight capital controls a precursor to a war with Taiwan or because the CCP expects some other shock to occur? Is their economy expected to crash for some other reason or is this simply dictatorships love centralised control over everything especially capital?

Could be in preparation for supplying arms to Russia.

But territorial integrity /s

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#119
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That possibility makes me really nervous. A few weeks ago I was pretty sure that Beijing would not be that stupid, and simply stick with sending tons of dual-use goods, to keep up the plausible deniability. But Chinese rockets hitting Ukrainian kids in Kyiv/Europe? That would trigger dramatic sanctions. I don't think that is priced into the current world stock market.

Well meanwhile the US is sending military aid targeting the donbas region, so what’s the difference?

That Ukraine wasn't the aggressor?

Re: Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify

#120
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be in preparation for supplying arms to Russia.

That possibility makes me really nervous. A few weeks ago I was pretty sure that Beijing would not be that stupid, and simply stick with sending tons of dual-use goods, to keep up the plausible deniability. But Chinese rockets hitting Ukrainian kids in Kyiv/Europe? That would trigger dramatic sanctions. I don't think that is priced into the current world stock market.

The west will only shoot its own foot with such sanctions. World economy melted down after sanctioning Russia. Imagine sanctioning China, the country which the entire world depends on for the cheap consumer goods that keeps the engine of capitalism running.
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