Chinese authorities have been cracking down on efforts by wealthy Chinese to hide their riches away from capital control (things like cryptocurrency or foreign real estate markets). Ant is basically an unregulated, app-based pay-day-lender: Its business model encourages desperate individuals to take on high risk, high interest loans which are then sold to investors - literally just extracting wealth from the productive economy.
But the revelation (for me at least) is that Chinese regulators have been telling Jack Ma that they would reject this IPO for months. From @danisth's article below:
Ma thought he could simply bull his way past the Chinese regulators – that because he runs Alibaba and its subsidiaries, that they would defer to him. But the whole point of a finance regulator is NOT to let the finance sector write its own rules.
And the western press flips the story and wraps it up in the existing "evil freedom-of-speech denying communist Chinese brutally repress its critics" narrative.
Here's an ELI5 I gathered from the below links:
Chinese authorities have been cracking down on efforts by wealthy Chinese to hide their riches away from capital control (things like cryptocurrency or foreign real estate markets). Ant is basically an unregulated, app-based pay-day-lender: Its business model encourages desperate individuals to take on high risk, high interest loans which are then sold to investors - literally just extracting wealth from the productive economy.
But the revelation (for me at least) is that Chinese regulators have been telling Jack Ma that they would reject this IPO for months. From @danisth's article below:
And the western press flips the story and wraps it up in the existing "evil freedom-of-speech denying communist Chinese brutally repress its critics" narrative.