US politicians unable to prevent capital from flowing into China
Republican US Senator Marco Rubio is known for his ludicrous anti-China gambits. His latest such attempt was a public letter warning regulators about the risks of investing in the Chinese market.
In the letter, Rubio wrote that purchases of China’s non-performing loans could be risky and thus he urged Attorney General William Barr to “vigilantly identify and enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases involving the sale of distressed debt by Chinese financial and nonfinancial companies to American firms.”
Rubio appears to show how he cares about protecting the interests of US financial firms, but in fact, there is every reason to believe he is merely attempting to extend his ideological opposition to China to the financial sector, a field that he apparently knows very little about.
Simply put, Rubio’s statement is nothing more than groundless, nonsensical criticism of China’s financial activities. Investing in China’s financial market, however, is exactly the kind of opportunity American financial institutions have been eyeing for years.
It doesn’t matter whether there has been a miscommunication between Rubio and Wall Street investors or the senator wants to show off his knowledge of the Chinese economy to impress financial insiders. After all, Rubio’s statement can neither derail the course of China’s opening-up nor dampen US investors’ enthusiasm for its financial market.
This is not the first time that US politicians like Rubio have tried to put restrictions on US capital flows into China, curbing funding in the Chinese economy. Last year, a group of bipartisan senators introduced legislation to block the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB) from investing in Chinese stocks, but the pension fund eventually stuck to its original plan of tracking a popular MSCI index that included A shares. Apparently, deciding whether or not investing in China is a good idea is not up to Rubio and his ilk.
Under the phase one China-US trade deal, China agreed to an accelerated pace of financial opening-up, which should be considered a mutually beneficial move. The acceleration also reflects how eager US investors are to share in China’s financial market dividends due to low market valuations, loose monetary policy and huge development potential in China.
In this sense, the trend of US investors hunting for profits in the thriving Chinese market is unstoppable.
