IF YOU WANT to understand how cooling relations between America and China are changing global business, a good place to look is Alibaba, an internet giant. It is China’s most admired and valuable firm, worth a cool $400bn. For the past five years it has also been a hybrid that straddles the superpowers, because its shares are listed only in America. Now it is considering a $20bn flotation in Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg.
The trade war between America and China has already spread from tariffs to a wide terrain encompassing legal extradition, venture capital and the global dollar-payments system. It is easy to see how an American listing could become a vulnerability. If, for example, China were to boycott Apple or Boeing, America could respond by suspending the trading of Chinese firms’ shares and stopping them from raising capital.
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