Jack Ma, one of China’s most prominent entrepreneurs, returned to China this week after traveling overseas for more than a year, in what is being interpreted as evidence of an improved climate for the nation’s private sector.

He paid a visit Monday to the Yungu School, a private academy in Hangzhou funded by Ma’s Alibaba Group, which includes one of the world’s biggest online commerce companies. There, he talked about “the future of education with the campus directors” and “the challenges and opportunities” that “new technological change brings to education,” according to the school’s WeChat account.

Earlier this month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “has always treated private entrepreneurs as its own people,” marking an about-face from suppressing the private economy during the pandemic with tactics that included stopping what was expected to be the $37 billion IPO of Ma’s Ant Group.

China’s economy trended down after COVID-19 was first identified in humans in Wuhan in December 2019. Xi led the crackdown on some of China’s most successful entrepreneurs as he pushed for “common prosperity” — long a CCP catchphrase — as an alternative to increasing inequality.

Some see Ma’s return as a signal of a fundamental change of China policies in the private sector.

An article from Ejam Finance, a Guangzhou-based new media company focusing on financial information, said, “Today, Jack Ma returned to China again! I believe this is also a day when the confidence of private entrepreneurs across the country soars.”

Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares rose by more than 10% after news broke of Ma’s return. Alibaba Group is planning to split into six units, it said Tuesday, as Beijing said it would ease a regulatory crackdown on private enterprises.

Zongyuan Zoe Liu, fellow for international political economy at the Council on Foreign Relations, told VOA Mandarin, “Ma Yun (Jack Ma) has been the token of Chinese entrepreneurship. His rise and fall (and seemingly rise again) have been closely associated with the Chinese government and government-led investment.”

According to Reuters, China’s new premier, Li Qiang, has been asking Ma to return since late last year, hoping it would boost business confidence among entrepreneurs, which enhanced the theory of Ma’s return being a prophecy of a policy change.

Fraser Howie, a longtime Asia analyst, is not optimistic that Ma’s return will change much.

He told Reuters, “I can see how this sort of signals a relaxation but none of the laws and institutions set up to control the private sector have changed.”

Liu said the most important aspect of Ma’s return is whether it can boost investors’ confidence in China’s economy.

“As long as confidence in the Chinese economy and confidence in the Chinese government’s support for the private sector can be quickly restored, it helps to quell rumors and reduce uncertainties. After all, economic growth is a confidence game,” she said.

She emphasized that confidence in the Chinese economy and expressing support for Ma’s return are two different things.

Hu Ping, a onetime district councilor in Beijing who later edited China Spring and Beijing Spring, both U.S.-based journals focused on Chinese politics, told VOA Mandarin that “the loss of Chinese private entrepreneurs’ confidence in the government is caused by Xi’s suppression policy.”

As long as Xi is in the office and his policies remain unchanged, people’s trust can’t be regained, Hu said.

Yao Wang, a Chinese investment expert who has been engaged in asset management in New York for nearly 30 years, believes that instead of using Ma’s return to boost confidence in private enterprise, Beijing should take some practical actions.

“The best way to show the stability, continuity, predictability, and transparency of policies is to fix it in the form of law,” he said.
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The scope of blame for Silicon Valley Bank’s failure stretches across bank executives, Federal Reserve supervisors and other regulators, the banking system’s top cop on Wednesday told U.S. lawmakers demanding answers for the lender’s swift collapse. 

“I think that any time you have a bank failure like this, bank management clearly failed, supervisors failed and our regulatory system failed,” Michael Barr, Fed Vice Chair for Supervision, told Congress. “So we’re looking at all of that.” 

The failures of SVB, and days later, Signature Bank, set off a broader loss of investor confidence in the banking sector that pummeled stocks and stoked fears of a full-blown financial crisis.

Depositors tried to pull more than $42 billion in a single day at SVB in early March, surprising regulators and kicking off deposit flight across other regional banks. 

“That’s just an extraordinary scale and speed of a run that I had not ever seen,” Barr said. “I think all of us were caught incredibly off-guard by the massive bank run that occurred when it did.”  

Representatives from both political parties pressed Barr, Martin Gruenberg, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, and Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance Nellie Liang on why regulators did not act more forcefully, given Fed supervisors had been raising issues with the bank for months.  

“There is still much we need to understand of what you knew when and how you responded,” said Republican Patrick McHenry, chair of the committee. “The bottom line for you as the panel, there’s bipartisan frustration with many of your answers. There’s a question of accountability and appearance of lack of accountability.”  

Barr on Tuesday criticized SVB for going months without a chief risk officer and for how it modeled interest rate risk, but lawmakers said the response wasn’t aggressive enough, with Democrat Juan Vargas saying, “it seems like they blew you guys off and you didn’t do anything.”  

Reports due May 1 

Both the Fed and FDIC are expected to produce reports on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank by May 1. The Fed’s report will concentrate on supervision and regulation while the FDIC report will center around deposit insurance.  

Several lawmakers asked Barr to make available the Fed’s confidential communications on supervision.  

Barr told the House Financial Services Committee that he first became aware of stress at Silicon Valley Bank on the afternoon of March 9, but that the bank reported to supervisors that morning that deposits were stable.  

Gruenberg of the FDIC told lawmakers he also became aware of SVB’s stress that Thursday evening.  

All three testifying said that regulators had sufficient tools to deal with the crisis once it happened, but Barr said the Fed could have done better on supervision. 

SVB and Signature became the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history. Investors fled to safe havens like bonds while depositors moved funds to bigger institutions and money market funds. 

Markets have calmed since Swiss regulators engineered the sale of troubled Swiss giant Credit Suisse to rival UBS, and after SVB’s assets were sold to First Citizens BancShares FCNCA.O. However, investors remain wary of more troubles lurking in the financial system. 

Some Democrats have also argued a 2018 bank deregulation law is to blame. That law, mostly backed by Republicans but also some moderate Democrats, relaxed the strictest oversight for firms holding between $100 billion and $250 billion in assets, which included SVB and Signature. 

The White House is readying plans for legislation that would reinstate those regulations on midsize banks, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing two sources familiar with the matter.  
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МВФ і Україна попередньо досягли угоди на 15,6 млрд доларів
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Цей внесок дозволить Україні підтримувати економічну стабільність та «допомагати українцям, які постраждали від розв’язаної Росією війни»
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Торік Україна розірвала дипломатичні відносини з Сирією. А нещодавно офіційний Київ терміном на 10 років запровадив санкції проти президента Сирії Башара аль-Асада
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Також 28 березня уряд ухвалив розпорядження для отримання цьогоріч другого гранту від США на суму 2,5 млрд доларів
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