[tinza123]

...that escalated quickly. Ant's business model is under the hood good old lending and banking, where their "innovation" excels at minimizing the barrier to spend your future money. This is not like Google or Microsoft, whose products are purely technology, this is a glorified financial company. And the more money they raise, the larger / crazier scale their lending will affect. Just to give you a hint, their "savings account" equivalent has way higher interest rate than the national banks, but with same level of account numbers if not more, that would need consistently piling money to sustain. Essentially they will become "too big to fail" if the IPO goes through, and you know how that went in 2008.

Yeah I guess Xi and co are scared, but for a different reason. Nothing about the foreign policies or whatever you think "freedom" is.

[Aperocky]

Ants lending business has doled out 1.8T on 36B of cash from Ant itself. That's 50 times the leverage they financed through ABS. A term that was very relevant in 2008.

Everything will be fine until the central bank raise interests, or if economy goes down the shitter. The new regulation limits the leverage cap from infinite to about 15, closer to bank's 10. This limits risk, and is considered a reasonable move.

A truly desperate move would be to allow these bubbles to go ahead and IPO. Which almost happened, everything will be fine and dandy for a while, until it's not. Whether it's due to Xi's insecurity or not, I'd say that China dodged a bullet here.

[travmatt]

“Xi shows his power by punishing a powerful businessman” is a much better story for him than “Xi limits size of over leveraged company over fears it could wreck economy”

[blackrock]

Exactly. This whole discussion about China suppressing Jack Ma is nonsense. It seems nobody here even knows what Ant was doing. And they’re all typically ignorant about whatever happens in China, and will just superimpose their biased views on them.

Ant was running some really shady and risky lending practices. They were not relevant when they were a private company, but once they became public, it instantly became a serious matter. The risk of failure is very high, and it risks bringing the whole system down.

What the government told Ant to do, was to have more collateral on their books. To increase it from 2% to 30%. Plain and simple. Then they can go forward with their IPO.

[petra]

Banks get their low collateral rate by the power of regulation.

How does a private company able to have only 2% collateral ?

[Aperocky]

It's effective collateral. When you can bundle the loans you just made and sell it to someone else, that's how you reduce your effective collateral.

There was no regulation on this before, leading to some very shady practices.