Wednesday 3 December 2008
Beijing fund wary of investment in foreign banks
Mainland’s sovereign wealth fund, which last year poured US$5 billion into Morgan Stanley, is reluctant to plough more money into foreign financial institutions until governments hash out coherent policies to cope with the global economic and financial turmoil, the fund’s head said on Wednesday.
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Beijing fund wary of investment in foreign banks
AP in Hong Kong
3 December 2008
Mainland’s sovereign wealth fund, which last year poured US$5 billion into Morgan Stanley, is reluctant to plough more money into foreign financial institutions until governments hash out coherent policies to cope with the global economic and financial turmoil, the fund’s head said on Wednesday.
The remarks by Lou Jiwei, chairman of the US$200 billion China Investment Corp, represent a new blow for ailing banks that were hoping the mainland government investment fund would use its deep pool of cash to bail them out.
Mr. Lou said that he was unwilling to invest in foreign banks amid so much turbulence and uncertainty. Confidence in financial institutions is lacking because foreign governments seem to be changing their policies every week, he said.
“Right now, we do not have the courage to invest in financial institutions,” said Lou, speaking on a panel discussion in Hong Kong at a conference organised by former President Bill Clinton.
He added, “We have to wait for the time when there won’t be massive collapses of financial institutions.”
The central government investment arm was set up to make profitable use of Beijing’s foreign reserves, which totaled US$1.9 trillion by the end of September.
Most of those funds are kept in US Treasuries and other safe but low-yielding securities. But there have been complaints about the performance of some of the fund’s higher profile investments amid the recent market turmoil.
CIC’s biggest investment to date was a US$5 billion investment in Morgan Stanley in December last year – one of nine major banks that subsequently sought relief from the deepening credit crisis through the US government’s US$700 billion banking bailout. That investment gave CIC a 9.9 per cent stake in the investment bank.
Media reports said the sovereign wealth fund had invested more than US$100 million in Visa’s US$19.1 billion initial public offering in March and invested in a fund managed by J.C. Flowers, a US private equity firm.
Mr. Lou said the fund would help soften the bite of the ongoing global crisis by continuing to invest in wealthy countries as well as in developing nations. But he said people should not count on the mainland China to pull the world out of the economic crisis.
“China can’t save the world. It can only save itself,” he said.
Mr. Lou said the country’s economy, the world’s fourth largest, is in relatively good shape, but is facing several major challenges, such as boosting domestic consumption and becoming less dependent on exports.
“This will be very difficult and requires a lot of reforms,” he said. “It might take one to two years.”
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