6 ms·

Jack Ma's Bund Finance Summit Speech

93 points by ceohockey60 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sebmellen 6y ago
I found this to be surprisingly nuanced and accurate. Reading this gives me an entirely different impression of Jack Ma's intelligence and perspective, especially after I watched his disastrous debate/talk with Elon Musk. > [The Basel Accords], more like a seniors club, is about solving the problem of an aging financial system that has been operating for decades, and Europe’s aging system is extremely complex. But the problem in China is the opposite: it is not a problem of systemic financial risk, because China's financial sector basically doesn’t have a system. Its risk is actually a "lack of financial system."
- jimbob45 6y ago
  His description of the world’s ailments is quite accurate, yes. His prescription for them, a big data-based credit system, seems frustratingly Chinese. Only time will tell if his futuristic system is the right way forward though.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Yes, I found that proposal rather myopic and disturbing. The concept of "big data" is so amorphous that in my mind it stands for "totalitarian surveillance system". I really have a hard time understanding the AI and Big Data buzzword fetishism. And, though this is probably controversial to say, I know of very few business that apply "AI"/ML to any real benefit. At least not much that couldn't be achieved with less complex statistical models.
    - donw 6y ago
      I would say that it's just endemic to the region. Countries in southeast Asia tend very strongly towards centralization, for a wide variety of historical reasons.
  - dasudasu 6y ago
    Fits right in with their social credit idea. I don't think it's even a veiled reference.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- tpmx 6y ago
  There is such a thing as speech ghostwriting. I'd even wager it's pretty standard for most high-level politicians and CEOs. It works very well when the format is a unidirectional speech, but obviously breaks down in a conversation/debate. My point here: If you want to figure out how smart Ma is, I think your reaction to how he performed in that discussion with Musk is a much stronger signal than how you perceived this speech. The probability of this speech being heavily managed is very high, especially since the global tech/investor crowd got that wow rection after that disastrous event with Musk.
  - bllguo 6y ago
    Don't think I agree with the unstated assumption here that debating chops and ability to improvise are endemic of high intelligence.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      Musk is objectively speaking quite bad at that too. Like, exceptionally bad for someone at that level. What we saw when Ma freestyled was something quite else though. It exposed something much more important than his inability to talk eloquently in English. Which noone really expected anyway, even though his background is being an English language teacher in China. Edit: His pronounciation, vocabulary and grammar is excellent! It's just the content...
      - Strom 6y ago
        > It exposed something much more important Could you elaborate on what was exposed?
        tpmx 6y ago
        Sorry, you'll have to watch these five minutes of Ma vs Musk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHGd6LqAVzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHGd6LqAVzw
        6y ago
- yorwba 6y ago
  If watching his conversation with Musk left you with a negative impression of Ma's intellect, he probably said some things you didn't expect a smart person to say. But that doesn't necessarily mean he's stupid. Personally, I think he just wasn't trying to fulfill your expectations, but instead targeting a different group, as I've explained in a comment in an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006975
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - yorwba 6y ago
    There was a now-deleted reply about a previous submission of mine discussing how the Belt and Road Initiative is a symptom of overaccumulation of capital that can't find a productive use (within China, anyways, hence the expansion abroad): https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2020/02/28/looking-at-the-belt-and-road-through-the-lens-of-marxist-geography/ https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2020/02/28/looking-at-the-be... I guess the author deleted their comment because it was kind of off-topic, but I just realized that it's actually somewhat on-topic since that overaccumulation of capital is another aspect of what Ma refers to with "Too much money can get you into a lot of trouble." although his example is about banks desperate to make loans to companies that don't need more money.
- nirui 6y ago
  Well, I guess it's the effect of the wisdom words that finally enlightened you. Ooooh, the wisdom words flowed out of this rich business man, carried his lies and false claims so naturally. The things are more clear if you knew that few days ago, the CEO of Ant Finance Xiaoming Hu comes out and said "Everybody, even beggars should be given loans. Everyone should be respected" (https://36kr.com/newsflashes/895377271796488 https://36kr.com/newsflashes/895377271796488). You know, banks don't want to give loans to beggars, and it's for a very good reason: Because banks don't want to lose any money, money that the banks don't actually own. Now, Ant Finance claims that they have buzzword BiGdATA to prove somebody's ability to payback, and so they can safely doing their ABS business (http://finance.ifeng.com/c/8189yYOdKfw http://finance.ifeng.com/c/8189yYOdKfw) without cause bubbles. But, at same time, it is very reasonable for a government to rise concern about it, especially after seeing whatever shit storm has been going on since around 2008. My point here is, everybody, richman, world leader, scumbag and good people etc, they can all make their speech sound nice and smart and reasonable, you just need 5 episodes of JCS Criminal Psychology to get yourself to understand that, deeply. So don't just listen to what people says, think what the speaker wants.
  - andreilys 6y ago
    “My point here is, everybody, richman, world leader, scumbag and good people etc, they can all make their speech sound nice and smart and reasonable, you just need 5 episodes of JCS Criminal Psychology to get yourself to understand that, deeply.” Watching 5 episodes of a TV show will most certainly not give you the eloquence of a JFK or a Martin Luther King. It comes from repeated practice, and in some cases a natural aptitude. It takes a lot of effort to master the art of rhetoric and getting your point across.
    - mola 6y ago
      I think you missread. He said you watching this show would make you understand his point, not become a first class rhetoric.
  - joshxyz 6y ago
    Thank you based nirui Well put
- xster 6y ago
  My issue with it is that it's a fancy speech and nothing he's saying is necessarily wrong. He mostly correctly bashed a bunch of strawmen to great effect. Except they have more or less nothing to do with what he actually wants, which is his ability to continue to re-securitize loans he makes until he gets to the ludicrous self-fund rate of 1.6% on the loans and offloading most of the risk to the rest of society while getting most of the gains. Nothing he complains about are infeasible with Basel III's reserve rate of 8%. Peer to peer lending, ML analysis on spending habits etc, none of his "innovations" are inhibited by regulation. The only thing it's affecting is the profit.
waynesonfire 6y ago
I googled the Ant IPO after reading this and this came up, "In Halting Ant’s I.P.O., China Sends a Warning to Business" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/technology/china-ant-group-ipo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/technology/china-ant-grou...
- karmasimida 6y ago
  I am not actually surprised. But the Chinese government goes hard to set an example at a global level. The message must be quite different for everyone, depending on your position, just saying.
- disown 6y ago
  From the article: "But I felt compelled to provide an English version of Jack Ma’s speech on October 24 at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai, because mainstream media coverage of the speech and the subsequent cancellation of Ant Group’s IPO has been lacking and simplistic." And you linked to a mainstream media piece that is lacking and simplistic.
  - AYBABTME 6y ago
    If your intent is to share counterpoints, you'll carry your ideas more effectively if you don't attack the people you respond to.
maerF0x0 6y ago
What he talks about risk and innovation being flip sides of the same coin, very interesting. Also an amazing insight that copying other developed nations may be maladaptive to the needs of China.
mathgenius 6y ago
It all seems very mild what he is saying. Some nice analogies. How did this get the Ant IPO killed? Maybe there is something else going on here...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hungryhobo 6y ago
  Sometimes i feel maybe people are just trying too hard to read between the lines, Especially when it comes to anything China related. Maybe it really is just the fact Chinese government wasn't comfortable with the asset/loans ratio that ANT is proposing?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dgfitz 6y ago
    The comment that would have been a sibling to mine has been deleted. Said comment referred to the parent comment and their proclivity to engage on specific topics.
  - max_likelihood 6y ago
    I actually read the same thing just a short while ago: https://valueinvesting.substack.com/p/why-ant-financials-ipo-was-pulled https://valueinvesting.substack.com/p/why-ant-financials-ipo.... The author states Ant would have operated by repackaging highly leveraged micro-loans in such a way that none of the risk would appear on anyone's balance sheet.
    - sn41 6y ago
      Wow. That sounds very similar to an event that really wrecked my life for a while. Some say that the 2007-09 crisis never really ended.
- powerapple 6y ago

93 points by ceohockey60 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

I found this to be surprisingly nuanced and accurate. Reading this gives me an entirely different impression of Jack Ma's intelligence and perspective, especially after I watched his disastrous debate/talk with Elon Musk. > [The Basel Accords], more like a seniors club, is about solving the problem of an aging financial system that has been operating for decades, and Europe’s aging system is extremely complex. But the problem in China is the opposite: it is not a problem of systemic financial risk, because China's financial sector basically doesn’t have a system. Its risk is actually a "lack of financial system."

jimbob45 6y ago
His description of the world’s ailments is quite accurate, yes. His prescription for them, a big data-based credit system, seems frustratingly Chinese. Only time will tell if his futuristic system is the right way forward though.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Yes, I found that proposal rather myopic and disturbing. The concept of "big data" is so amorphous that in my mind it stands for "totalitarian surveillance system". I really have a hard time understanding the AI and Big Data buzzword fetishism. And, though this is probably controversial to say, I know of very few business that apply "AI"/ML to any real benefit. At least not much that couldn't be achieved with less complex statistical models.
  - donw 6y ago
    I would say that it's just endemic to the region. Countries in southeast Asia tend very strongly towards centralization, for a wide variety of historical reasons.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  Fits right in with their social credit idea. I don't think it's even a veiled reference.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
tpmx 6y ago
There is such a thing as speech ghostwriting. I'd even wager it's pretty standard for most high-level politicians and CEOs. It works very well when the format is a unidirectional speech, but obviously breaks down in a conversation/debate. My point here: If you want to figure out how smart Ma is, I think your reaction to how he performed in that discussion with Musk is a much stronger signal than how you perceived this speech. The probability of this speech being heavily managed is very high, especially since the global tech/investor crowd got that wow rection after that disastrous event with Musk.
- bllguo 6y ago
  Don't think I agree with the unstated assumption here that debating chops and ability to improvise are endemic of high intelligence.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Musk is objectively speaking quite bad at that too. Like, exceptionally bad for someone at that level. What we saw when Ma freestyled was something quite else though. It exposed something much more important than his inability to talk eloquently in English. Which noone really expected anyway, even though his background is being an English language teacher in China. Edit: His pronounciation, vocabulary and grammar is excellent! It's just the content...
    - Strom 6y ago
      > It exposed something much more important Could you elaborate on what was exposed?
      - tpmx 6y ago
        Sorry, you'll have to watch these five minutes of Ma vs Musk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHGd6LqAVzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHGd6LqAVzw
        6y ago
yorwba 6y ago
If watching his conversation with Musk left you with a negative impression of Ma's intellect, he probably said some things you didn't expect a smart person to say. But that doesn't necessarily mean he's stupid. Personally, I think he just wasn't trying to fulfill your expectations, but instead targeting a different group, as I've explained in a comment in an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006975
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- yorwba 6y ago
  There was a now-deleted reply about a previous submission of mine discussing how the Belt and Road Initiative is a symptom of overaccumulation of capital that can't find a productive use (within China, anyways, hence the expansion abroad): https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2020/02/28/looking-at-the-belt-and-road-through-the-lens-of-marxist-geography/ https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2020/02/28/looking-at-the-be... I guess the author deleted their comment because it was kind of off-topic, but I just realized that it's actually somewhat on-topic since that overaccumulation of capital is another aspect of what Ma refers to with "Too much money can get you into a lot of trouble." although his example is about banks desperate to make loans to companies that don't need more money.
nirui 6y ago
Well, I guess it's the effect of the wisdom words that finally enlightened you. Ooooh, the wisdom words flowed out of this rich business man, carried his lies and false claims so naturally. The things are more clear if you knew that few days ago, the CEO of Ant Finance Xiaoming Hu comes out and said "Everybody, even beggars should be given loans. Everyone should be respected" (https://36kr.com/newsflashes/895377271796488 https://36kr.com/newsflashes/895377271796488). You know, banks don't want to give loans to beggars, and it's for a very good reason: Because banks don't want to lose any money, money that the banks don't actually own. Now, Ant Finance claims that they have buzzword BiGdATA to prove somebody's ability to payback, and so they can safely doing their ABS business (http://finance.ifeng.com/c/8189yYOdKfw http://finance.ifeng.com/c/8189yYOdKfw) without cause bubbles. But, at same time, it is very reasonable for a government to rise concern about it, especially after seeing whatever shit storm has been going on since around 2008. My point here is, everybody, richman, world leader, scumbag and good people etc, they can all make their speech sound nice and smart and reasonable, you just need 5 episodes of JCS Criminal Psychology to get yourself to understand that, deeply. So don't just listen to what people says, think what the speaker wants.
- andreilys 6y ago
  “My point here is, everybody, richman, world leader, scumbag and good people etc, they can all make their speech sound nice and smart and reasonable, you just need 5 episodes of JCS Criminal Psychology to get yourself to understand that, deeply.” Watching 5 episodes of a TV show will most certainly not give you the eloquence of a JFK or a Martin Luther King. It comes from repeated practice, and in some cases a natural aptitude. It takes a lot of effort to master the art of rhetoric and getting your point across.
  - mola 6y ago
    I think you missread. He said you watching this show would make you understand his point, not become a first class rhetoric.
- joshxyz 6y ago
  Thank you based nirui Well put
xster 6y ago
My issue with it is that it's a fancy speech and nothing he's saying is necessarily wrong. He mostly correctly bashed a bunch of strawmen to great effect. Except they have more or less nothing to do with what he actually wants, which is his ability to continue to re-securitize loans he makes until he gets to the ludicrous self-fund rate of 1.6% on the loans and offloading most of the risk to the rest of society while getting most of the gains. Nothing he complains about are infeasible with Basel III's reserve rate of 8%. Peer to peer lending, ML analysis on spending habits etc, none of his "innovations" are inhibited by regulation. The only thing it's affecting is the profit.

waynesonfire 6y ago

I googled the Ant IPO after reading this and this came up, "In Halting Ant’s I.P.O., China Sends a Warning to Business" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/technology/china-ant-group-ipo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/technology/china-ant-grou...

karmasimida 6y ago
I am not actually surprised. But the Chinese government goes hard to set an example at a global level. The message must be quite different for everyone, depending on your position, just saying.
disown 6y ago
From the article: "But I felt compelled to provide an English version of Jack Ma’s speech on October 24 at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai, because mainstream media coverage of the speech and the subsequent cancellation of Ant Group’s IPO has been lacking and simplistic." And you linked to a mainstream media piece that is lacking and simplistic.
- AYBABTME 6y ago
  If your intent is to share counterpoints, you'll carry your ideas more effectively if you don't attack the people you respond to.

maerF0x0 6y ago

What he talks about risk and innovation being flip sides of the same coin, very interesting. Also an amazing insight that copying other developed nations may be maladaptive to the needs of China.

mathgenius 6y ago

It all seems very mild what he is saying. Some nice analogies. How did this get the Ant IPO killed? Maybe there is something else going on here...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hungryhobo 6y ago
Sometimes i feel maybe people are just trying too hard to read between the lines, Especially when it comes to anything China related. Maybe it really is just the fact Chinese government wasn't comfortable with the asset/loans ratio that ANT is proposing?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dgfitz 6y ago
  The comment that would have been a sibling to mine has been deleted. Said comment referred to the parent comment and their proclivity to engage on specific topics.
- max_likelihood 6y ago
  I actually read the same thing just a short while ago: https://valueinvesting.substack.com/p/why-ant-financials-ipo-was-pulled https://valueinvesting.substack.com/p/why-ant-financials-ipo.... The author states Ant would have operated by repackaging highly leveraged micro-loans in such a way that none of the risk would appear on anyone's balance sheet.
  - sn41 6y ago
    Wow. That sounds very similar to an event that really wrecked my life for a while. Some say that the 2007-09 crisis never really ended.
powerapple 6y ago