After discussing the troubled rural banks in Henan in my previous post, it is important to note that what happened in Henan was not the first adverse credit event to hit the Chinese financial system. It was just the most recent in the country’s latest string of notable financial events, which can be said to have started back in May 2019 with the intervention in Baoshang Bank. A little over a year later, Baoshang became the first Chinese bank to be shut down since Shantou Commercial Bank closed shop in 2001. The Baoshang case was followed by interventions or investigations involving several other…

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has issued a direct critique against the U.S. government’s policy of containment when it comes to China. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the critique is unusual in that it comes directly from China’s leader rather than indirectly through governmental spokespersons. The Journal article quotes Shirley Martey Hargis, fellow at the Washington think tank Atlantic Council, who suggests that Xi might just be shifting the blame for economic problems in China. “It’s either take the blame or shift it,” she said. Notwithstanding China’s economic problems, however, the fact is that Xi is right. There is no denying that U.S.…

Tech giant Google has reportedly agreed to pay $391.5 million in a settlement with 40 state attorneys general over the company’s deceptive location tracking features. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said, “They have been crafty and deceptive. Consumers thought they had turned off their location tracking features on Google, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers.” TechCrunch reports that Google has agreed to pay $391.5 million in a settlement with 40 state attorneys general over its location tracking practices, following an investigation that found Google had misled users into thinking they had turned off location tracking even…

As the world increasingly re-divides into hostile blocs, the need for dialogue is increasing but the number of places for such conversations is shrinking. This year, there were no Russian or Iranian officials at the Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January, and none were invited to the venerable Munich Security Conference in Germany, which takes place this weekend. While understandable given egregious actions by both governments, it is also unfortunate. The Munich conference, held since 1963 at an upscale hotel in Bavaria, bills itself as “a unique platform for high-level debates on the greatest foreign and security policy challenges of…

Apart from Europe and the South China Sea region, the Middle East and North Africa is one of the epicenters for what the U.S. has termed “great power competition” especially between the U.S. and China, although Russia also figures into the assessment. There is particular sensitivity to China’s perceived economic inroads into the region as it has surged to become its largest economic partner. Apart from China’s dependence on imports of Gulf oil to meet its energy needs, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has expanded Beijing’s footprint from Oman in the east to Morocco in the west. Based on Arab…