Recent data from Dealogic shows that wall street investment banks face bleak prospects in the Chinese market. Lucia Dunn, an economics professor at Ohio State University, says that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will never deal with them in a Western-standard fairway.
After lobbying the Trump administration to sign a trade war ceasefire agreement with the CCP, Wall Street was thrown a sweet pie by the CCP, allowing foreign banks to operate wholly owned subsidiaries in China. According to the U.S.–China trade agreement, the CCP authorities lifted the foreign ownership limits in the mutual fund and securities industries on April 1, 2020.
However, after more than three years of financial involvement in China, Wall Street giants now find that learning from their joint venture partners, Chinese state-owned enterprises have entrenched positions in the financial sector that foreign firms simply cannot compete with.
As of June 16, this year, overseas investors, including those from Hong Kong, held around $364 billion worth of stocks in Shanghai and Shenzhen, which is less than 3 percent of the entire market, according to Wind data.
Among the seven Wall Street and European investment banks operating in China, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC reported losses in their Chinese subsidiaries in 2022, while Morgan Stanley saw a decline in profits. JPMorgan and UBS were the only banks with profit growth.
In May, Morgan Stanley announced another round of layoffs that will result in a 7 percent reduction in its Asia-Pacific investment banking division, leaving many bankers unemployed. Since September of last year, at least 100 China-focused foreign investment banking positions have been lost. Goldman Sachs alone has laid off over 10 percent of its staff in China, which is more than 60 people.
Lucia Dunn, an economics professor at Ohio State University, told The Epoch Times on June 11: “I think the CCP will cut off more and more businesses until Western companies finally wake up and see the handwriting on the wall.”
Dunn said: “In my own industry—higher education—for many years China enticed Western academics to come there to teach by offering lavish payments. Then when they thought they had gotten all they could appropriate from Western academics, they kicked many of us out. I think the same will happen with other industries. Eventually, many Western companies will voluntarily leave because the conditions the CCP is imposing will mean they can no longer make adequate profits. I think the CCP will squeeze them to the limit.”
In addition to poor market performance, foreign investment banks also face regulatory issues in China. For example, the CCP’s stringent data rules make it difficult for their subsidiaries in China to share crucial information with their headquarters, including the actual operation of their funds and the identities of their clients.
These foreign investment banks have also received demands from CCP regulatory agencies to control executive compensation and defer bonuses to comply with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s so-called “common prosperity” goal.
Dunn stated that major investments by American and European companies in China are shortsighted.
Wall Street’s Shuttle Diplomacy
In February 2018, when former President Donald Trump launched a trade war against China, putting the Chinese regime in a difficult position, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He traveled to Washington D.C. seeking a truce and turned to a group of Wall Street tycoons for help.Liu made a promise to the gathering. He said the Chinese regime would provide new opportunities for American financial firms to expand in China.
Shuttle diplomacy refers to a type of diplomacy where a mediator travels back and forth between two or more parties in order to facilitate negotiations and resolve disputes.
Anders Corr, the founder of Corr Analytics and publisher of “Political Risk Magazine,” told The Epoch Times on June 11 that Wall Street tycoons “naturally want to avoid military and economic conflict that would likely hurt his company’s prospects for profit, including in China. By lobbying Washington to de-risk the relationship with China rather than de-couple, which would impose greater costs on the regime in Beijing, Beijing may be willing to provide a sweetheart deal to banks that increase their profits and CEO bonuses that vest over time.”