China

“We've got, if you were to dig deep enough, you would say, oh, I bet you they've got a lot of investment in China. Yeah, we do. And so maybe we want to take that RMB exposure down a little bit, because that's something you could imagine having, you know, a real…”

“And in many ways, China today is just like Asia, 20, 25 years ago. The local investors are largely punters. They're largely short term. They don't really have the sophistication.”

“It's the finest energy asset in China, It's the finest infrastructure asset in Asia. It's the lowest cost producer of clean energy in a country that's choking on coal. This is really an important asset period in China.”

“China and Russia, we can't do it because we believe in the rule of law. So we're not going to invest in those areas in a big way.”

“China's Demographics are rapidly shifting from very healthy, as in, you know, a lot of working age people, to very Japanese-like, and as that occurs, you're going to get the same problems you had in Japan. Savings rates are going to start really dropping very …”

“If you're a very careful, active investor, you can actually do pretty well, and certainly in a modest part of your portfolio, you should have somebody who's a good China stock picker picking some of the stocks for you, but the beta is so undependable that you …”

“That part of GDP is actually growing quite robustly and will continue to grow, I think, for another at least five to seven years, maybe even 10, but also not forever. And because that's growing at almost 10% a year now, and it's about half of the Chinese econo…”

“The problem with the Chinese capital markets is that they tend to be extraordinarily distorted on both sides. When they're up way too much. When they're down, they go down way too much. And that's a lot because they're so policy driven. And also because they'r…”

“Macro was actually almost useless for people in China because it was all based on a set of institutions that didn't exist there, and actually still don't in many ways.”

“We have the overweights that I mentioned in China, and the other big overweight is in energy. And what we like about energy, and still do, is the fundamentals are really, really good, but the attitudes, the news reports, the emotions are not good, and that's r…”

“In international, we are overweight. We think they're earlier in their cycle, so we're overweight. Particularly in emerging and within emerging, particularly in China.”

“And right now we have a really big overweight on China, but I think it has more to do that we have high conviction in several Chinese managers than it is about a view on China. We like China. We think there's a tailwind story there, but the real reason we have…”

“How many million people is Modi going to lift out of poverty? Right? I reckon it might be more than the Chinese have, but just whisper it.”

“So the common assumption that worries me most about China is that they must have a subprime-like crisis at some point. I'm not sure about that. A financial crisis, some kind of credit cycle, liquidity cycle, defaults, for sure. But to use that subprime mental …”

“The stock is still rising, and perhaps I'm being simplistic, but I don't see how you ever deflate what is frankly a gigantic liquidity bubble rolling from asset class to asset class inside China without some pretty stern consequences for Chinese GDP. And that'…”

“What if India today is at the same point of its commodity demand cycle as China was in 2003? Now that could be big, and my suspicion is that that hunch could explain part of why global commodity markets and energy markets remain fairly well supported.”

“When I started in Really the eighties and then the nineties. You didn't have to think about what's happening in Germany and what's happening in China. There wasn't this extreme correlation that is today between every different piece that links up within the wo…”

“Third thing is the middle class or upper middle class in China is larger than the U.S. Population.”

“The Chinese market, as anybody who spends any time with it knows, is still dominated by retail investors, prices particularly. So unless you're good at understanding retail investors and how they track past price performance and project future price performanc…”

“Japanese equities down 40%, China hard landing, the world ends, like we're levered about four times short, notional short on CDS.”

“In 2030, or sometime in the 20 thirties, China is going to move to negative population growth.”

“If you look at the publication of AI research, probably two X has come from China as opposed to the US.”

“But they don't have the right culture. They don't have the right history to do that. We do. We have this amazing advantage that we're not taking advantage of.”

“China and the US are in a trade war, and probably more importantly, embarking on something which I think has historic implications, or at least for the next 10 years, but it's this relationship from a technology basis with the two technology powers on the plan…”

“We've got a major overweight to emerging markets and particularly China, and we're actually debating what's the right allocation for China, et cetera. Right now it's a little over 10% of the entity. It's an important component of our public equities. We're abo…”

“The biggest concern certainly is that in some way through this whole thing with China, that China would truly go away as an agricultural trading partner somehow. I think that's probably the biggest overall risk. The other macro risks that I mentioned around in…”

“Whereas what they have done is they have blended the system, the nationalist system they had with elements of capitalism, but without losing that element of control.”

“There's more AI research coming out of Europe than anywhere in the world. More than the US, more than China.”

“I'll make one observation you didn't ask about, but it does, I found it fascinating, which is that we have more investment managers in China on the private side with a senior partner or the CEO of the firm as a woman than we have here, because here we have zer…”

“There isn't really a true private equity market in China yet. It's more of a growth equity and venture market, and probably also cheaper than the US.”

“I don't know how a guy sitting in New York can be as effective in China as people who are on the ground there.”

“In China, for example, we're seeing some really interesting managers, but if you go back eight years ago, I think they were fewer and farther between, and we settled a couple times to get the exposure and to get some learning under our belt, and, you know, in …”

“We don't tend to hedge our currency exposure in emerging markets, but we may get very nervous broadly about emerging markets exposure for macro reasons, and hedge that exposure even though it's quite expensive to do so, or something like China specifically, wh…”

“The trade war is not easy to resolve. We've probably got it what I think of as a phase 0.5 deal. The bare minimum coming very soon. A bigly good signing ceremony and, you know, the usual circus and theater as we come to expect. But the rest of it's impossible …”

“If the past two and a half years is a rough guide on the ability of Chinese financial officials to pull this all off, you would bet with them, not against them.”

“At the most basic level, it means we should all pencil in a much lower rate of Chinese trend growth, but that's obvious. So it means that the margin that China's not going to be exporting inflation, they're going to be sort of a curb, if you will, on global gr…”

“Now it's kind of leapfrogged. The United States in terms of their distribution with what they're doing online.”

“But there was really over in China at the time, there was really no great distribution network. And it was all big state owned enterprises, which also made it difficult to kind of work out relationships.”

“So much more of the US brand going over there. I think there is a sense over there of the US quality of the brands and trying to have that kind of Western experience in certain categories.”

“We formed a partnership with Hill House Capital, where we have invested in certain brands that they've identified over in China, And they've invested with certain of our portfolio companies here in the U.S. That we could bring over to China.”

“If you look at Europe, actually, I would argue that there's more alpha there because there's more regulation. There's less transparency. It's very difficult because a lot of times it helps to be part of the culture and to speak the language. And if you could b…”

“At that time, in January, it's very uncertain what the course is going to be here. Is it going to get here? Is there going to be community transfer? There's just all sorts of, like, the range of outcomes is super, super, super wide at this point, so we're real…”

“China is the least troubled area in terms of markets right now.”

“If you add up the next 20 countries, Japan, Hong Kong, France, India, Canada, the UK, and so forth, you get to 30 trillion dollars, almost exactly the same as the United States.”

“I think the US is by far the stumbling block in terms of global coordination today. Europe and China And the rest of the world, frankly, are ready to move and are waiting for the US.”

“Number two, you need to acknowledge the amazing investment that China has made in renewable energy. It far exceeds anywhere else in the world, and yeah,”

“Again, it is a US and perhaps European phenomenon. You are still seeing lots of IPOs and new companies. Accessing public markets in China and emerging markets, and we think that's good.”

“Places like the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Mexico will gain as a result of that kind of second location as they scale back in China and scale up there.”

“It was roughly 15 percentage points cheaper to produce in China versus the U.S. Back in the early 2000.”

“When you fast forward to 2015 and 16 and look at the cost gap between the U.S. And China, what you'll find is that China's competitive advantage was pretty much fully eroded by then, so it was no longer You know, that compelling to just simply produce in China…”

“And China today, Is 85% retail and 15% professional.”

“That leads you therefore to look at China as a better source of alpha, theoretically at least, than the United States. Which is the most professionalized market.”

“I think that this great power competition between China and the U.S. And potentially other countries mixed in creates a really interesting environment for frontier markets like Africa, maybe some of the less developed countries in Latin America and Asia as wel…”

“I think a lot of these big tech companies are still being priced in for a global TAM, which they will not get. And they won't get it, not because China, like, bans them. But because I think every economic region, every major economy has an incentive to impose …”

“Look, right now, from what we understand at Clocktower, the allocation to China is about two percent. For real money allocators, and it's like 20, 25% of global economy.”

“So the yield divergence between US and China is going to favor carry trades in China because they're adopting far less stimulative policies.”

“Eventually American policymakers realize this is a constraint, this is a huge constraint, that they cannot sever their economic relationship from China, because if they do, somebody else will pick up the benefits, the revenues.”

“China's the one exception to the rule that an inefficient market is small. It's an enormous market that still seems to be quite inefficient, not just in equities, but in other securities as well.”

“At the beginning of last year, China launched a pilot of the digital RMB, and before that pilot launched, there was very little talk of central bank digital currencies among the western big central banks. After that successful pilot, the rest of twenty-twenty …”

“We've had some of the largest exits. That we've ever had across the history of our firm come out of our China venture portfolio because the numbers are just so unbelievable.”

“Four of the largest economies in the world actually don't have defined enterprise software layers. That's China. It's Japan. It is India and the Asian Peninsula. They don't have defined enterprise software. They have some enterprise software companies, or ente…”

“No particulate matter, Which takes years off everybody's life and kills several million people a year in China from coal and so on and diesel.”

“They have 300,000 electric buses, and the U.S. Has 400.”

“China, who is going to represent, according to the World Bank, over 30% of the entire world's growth over the next 20 years”

“Emerging markets, as I said, it's way over half of the global GDP. It is growing far faster, and because of the size of China, it's guaranteed to do that. It's going to have a much better growth rate this year under stress, much better than the GDP growth of t…”

“Workers, Which in the U.S. Have not had a real increase per hour work since the mid-nineteen seventies, can you believe, where even dopey Europe has more than doubled, and China and Vietnam has more than ten-tupled, and so on.”

“The team that I have in Shanghai is not an investment team. I do not invest in Chinese companies directly, but a lot of the companies in which we invest through our funds, our investment strategies, we push them and we help them to build their presence in Chin…”

“China has been an incredibly important geography for us. It's almost 20% of our portfolio.”

“I see their innovation cycle only getting stronger. What they've done in technology is well known with companies like Alibaba and ByteDance, but now in life sciences, they're actually becoming a real innovator in the life sciences space.”

“I'm pro-China. I'm open about it in the sense that I admire what they've accomplished in the last 34 years. I admire where they're going as a country. They are ambitious, just like the United States is ambitious, and they are a very strong strategic competitor…”

“The traffic in China, for various reasons, is more fungible than it is in the rest of the world, and it can be, so platforms, very powerful traffic drivers, can sometimes direct that traffic in unexpected places to drive competition and disruption.”

“So the risk we're always fighting against for almost all of our investments is commoditization. When you have a robotics company or whatever it is, there's like literally hundreds of robotics companies in China chasing that. If you're going to invest in semico…”

“So making that culture call correctly actually is pretty important in China, arguably even more important than elsewhere in the world, especially those traits of adaptability.”

“And also Chinese companies in many cases tend to be much more centralized in terms of power. So you do have to take into consideration a lot more, I think, that founders Their proclivities, their strengths and weaknesses, and so on when you make a bit of a cul…”

“There's very few good FMCG or fast-moving consumer good companies in China. You see the brand turnover, at least outside of the prestige or luxury space, is very fast.”

“Getting to a hundred million users or a certain amount of critical scale is really, it's not, I wouldn't say really easy, but it's certainly far easier in China versus anywhere else in the world, and that drives disruption.”

“So for example, we do equity work in China on an ESG basis. So our offering in equity to China is a naturally ESG focused offering”

“Doing ESG in the developed world is a big enough challenge because The data needs to be cleaned up. It's often it's self-reported data. Therefore, it doesn't experience that much scrutiny or criticism, but doing it in China, you double up the challenge. Sourci…”

“And so we've really made a push into China. We've started our Shanghai office. And so China is, I think, a no brainer.”

“And we're spending a lot of time on that from an investment standpoint, because the amount of money that's going to be going into this It's going to be extraordinary, and you've already started seeing it.”

“They took their best and brightest, and they've been working on AI. They've been working on cybersecurity. Our best and brightest have been creating apps and games.”

“If I were to turn the clock back on China, 3040 years ago, that's exactly where Vietnam is today.”

“We have seen peak globalization. The export driven economic model that was used by very successfully by Japan, then Korea, Taiwan, and now China, that is not going to be as easy to replicate going forward.”

“I don't like point estimates. I think that gives you a false sense of security that you know what's going to happen in Russia in year eight or China in year 12.”

“What does it mean to be politically correct is to invest alongside national policy goals. And certainly while China is an extreme example that you always, you generally want to be investing in companies and industries that are being politically correct, that y…”

“Decarbonization by 20 60. That will be the biggest story after COVID. I think the market is commentators will look back on 2020 and we'll miss this, but we'll say many years later that was a big announcement.”

“For example, the largest exporter of Vietnam today is not shoes and t-shirts and it's actually Samsung. Samsung doesn't produce smartphones in China anymore. They do produce them in Korea, but the low and medium end phones are now produced out of Vietnam. The …”

“Did you know that producing, in China, the producing electricity from solar and from onshore wind is almost at parity with producing electricity from thermal. No subsidies needed.”

“One of the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years, 30 years, is we don't put enough political risk into our Like a 20 in India is not the same thing as a 20 in the United States. There's so many things that can go wrong, and the rule of law is so l…”

“We've avoided going to China as investors, except in one area, in hotels. We have a joint venture with a Chinese account.”

“Lately, I've been thinking a lot about risk management because I've been thinking about China and some of the manager's That we're so overweight in some of the education companies and things like that. You can't really do that in venture capital because it's a…”

“India will have to rely on manufacturing and services. It will take a long time for, we're seeing their manufacturing capabilities increase, so it'll be a combination, but services will also be a big offering for India. Luckily, Indians speak English. They've …”

“It's firstly not even feasible today, for example, to make a t-shirt in China. The labor costs are just too high, but it is feasible to create a factory for garments or for washing machines in Bangladesh, in India, in Vietnam.”

“China's already large. It'll grow fine. But do you get that same J curve effect? Probably not. And that's where these markets are today.”

“I think it's actually a misconception that if China goes through difficulty, so does South and Southeast Asia. I think actually South and Southeast Asia are big winners when we are seeing turbulence”

“And if you don't have a real local presence, it's why, you know, anyone has said, well, why don't you go buy into China right now? China's depressed, or China's stock prices are down. And it's just like, I don't have any edge. And if I don't have an edge, then…”

“What I would say is that Brazil is cheaper in terms of price to growth. So when you look at the price to growth, most of these compounds are trading at .8.75. So compared to the U.S., they're relatively cheap. And the high growers, let's say the really high gr…”

“So I think that those two forces are really going to be probably the most important thing to me, more important than climate change, more important than a lot of the things that have captured the current zeitgeist.”

“China's trying its best to get to those sophisticated levels below five nanometer chip level, which it can't. And I think it's going to take a long time for them to do that. Much longer than people think. There's no Moore's law in getting to that level. And so…”

“So I think that China has peaked as a geopolitical power for the next decade.”

“I think we're redrawing the commodity supply chains because suddenly things like cobalt become extremely relevant to the future of your energy supply. And most of it is found in the Congo and China has really good reach in the Congo.”

“The Chinese Communist Party can be a legitimate domestic political force without reunifying with Taiwan. We know that because they haven't, and they're legitimate. They continue to rule China. Whereas we don't know what would happen to the Chinese Communist Pa…”

“For U.S., the constraint is that they can't build a coalition of the willing against China. If every country in the world is going to cheat, if France is going to sell airbuses, if America pulls back on Boeings, if that's what's going to happen, then there is …”

“As I said, I think China is going to be very cautious. I think for China, this is not the moment To create a huge downside risk to its economy.”

“US and China are the only two countries that had this web two point O revolution. Europe doesn't have social media companies. Japan missed it completely.”

“I'm in a camp that says they're going to fail. They're not going to be able to do it, and they're going to remain as export dependent, if not more.”

“So if you look at household debt as percent of disposable income in China, it's higher than that of the U.S.”

“Which means that over the next decade, China will also be in a current account deficit.”

“The biggest mistake is hire the professional above the founder. I kind of feel like in China, in this kind of dynamic, competitive environment, you need the founder to run the company. If the founder is not running the company, if the founder has some shortcom…”

“So we will have maybe six hundred million middle class consumer in the next five to 10 years.”

“When we first started Capital Today, we had this cold call strategy. A lot of deals, like 40% of a deal are sourced by cold call”

“And we believe that when China become the largest country For both manufacturing and consumption, and China's leader will become a global leader. And we see that happening in the world of electronics manufacturing, in the world of cell phone, and it will happe…”

“He said, in China, no matter what you do, if you do well, there will be like 100,000 of copycats. So he said, I'm going to do three production line. He said, the entry barrier, the only way to defend your competitor is get big fast.”

“I have invested three guys who become the richest man in China.”

“He's doing e-commerce, but he's one step ahead than Amazon, because when JD started the business, when we give him the money, he did two things. Number one, he expand the category. Number two, he build the distribution center. Amazon didn't have distribution c…”

“And it's interesting to me that ecosystems that got started later, for example, China, are more gender diverse than the US one has been.”

“Companies in Silicon Valley that have built big operations in China may face a point where they need to separate the two brands.”

“When you're dealing with China, I think our secret weapon is to have a native speaker. And when you're speaking in the native language, she can pick up on so many of the nuances that I can't, and she can be on the chat boards and just get so much richer view o…”

“We have about 15% of the portfolio, public and private, in Asia. And we'll just, I'll start with China first. So it's, and of that, half of it is in China, half is elsewhere in Asia, which I actually think is a good number.”

“But from our perspective, we actually think that China's going to be the largest economy very shortly. It will grow. It'll continue to grow. At a rate higher than any other developed country kind of post COVID.”

“If you take a broader perspective and kind of open up the aperture, this is cyclical. This happens every seven to 10 years, where the Chinese government makes sure everybody knows and realizes kind of who's in charge at the end of the day.”

“And I would say that the sanctions that Russia has been hit by, the struggle that their army has had, if anything, it really highlights to Xi Jinping that the risks are really pretty big. It'd be a hell of a dice to roll to go ahead with this. So in that respe…”

“And the reality is you're comparing, it's not that you're comparing apples and oranges. You're comparing apples to tennis balls. They're not, it's not even the same fruit. It's not the same system. It's not. And so all the rules that you think, you know, you c…”

“If you buy your energy in your own currency, it's a Huge comparative advantage. So China should actually be fine out of all of this.”

“You could ignore Russia because their economy is smaller than the size of Texas. But China is somewhere between 15 to 25% of global GDP, depending on how you count and what numbers you believe.”

“I really think that we're in a process of moving to a massive cold war of the West against China and Russia. I think that's terrible for returns and asset prices, and it's really bad, obviously, for Chinese assets.”

“Well, we think the currency in China is a great short. So it's one of our larger positions. We're short than the CNH. We do have some individual equity shorts there. We've been short China since August last year”

“If he stays in power, which it looks like he's going to, and he's got the same people around him, the same advisors, I think China is going to ultimately become an uninvestable market.”

“I think that we probably peaked on international investing a couple years ago. I think there is a little bit of a pullback, depending geographically who the investor is, but from the United States perspective, certainly there's been a pullback because of geopo…”

“We think that healthcare is for sure a theme in healthcare in China. China's a little scary for a lot of people right now. It was a big part of a lot of portfolios, and I would say it's a little scary for investment committees to think about committing new cap…”

“Trying to sell China to US institution or even a European institution today, forget it. It's not going to happen. You're wasting your time.”

“The emerging market outperformance, the outperformance of Brazil, of Mexico, of India, of Indonesia, of Singapore, et cetera, all that is being hidden by China.”

“Now that BHP accepts RMB, what are the odds that China is going to go back to trading in US dollars with RMB? They're not. Instead, China's going to turn to Vale and Rio Tinto and say, your buddies at BHP, they accept RMB, so if you want our business, maybe yo…”

“Right now, when you look at how people are positioned, everybody's positioned for option one. The U.S. Is the only place to be.”

“It basically sounded the death of globalization, which was in my eyes, the main force for the global deflationary forces.”

“Or do we go back to management by committee, in which case you massively crank down the level of political risk, and you make things like an invasion of Taiwan very unlikely?”

“You look at the monetary aggregates of Brazil or China or Indonesia, they didn't grow to the same extent as we saw in the Western world.”

“I think you can't afford not to be in China.”

“And great global companies were created, and I think more global companies will be created in sectors that the government really wants to sponsor. I think it will become ever more challenging for us to be able to benefit from that.”

“Goldman Sachs, which was, as I said, I think the premier investment bank in the world, when I worked there in 1983 to 1985, had zero people in China and two people in Hong Kong.”

“If you wanted to make money in smartphones, 20 years ago, whenever it was, you invested in Apple, and you had a global industry leader. That's not going to happen anymore. You will have Apple US, Apple China”

“I think from an investable universe, half of the private equity in Asia had really ultimately been within China, and a lot of that was actually USD offshore. What's been interesting to watch is the size of the China private equity and venture market from a fun…”

“I think that inflation peaked a while back and is headed down. I don't know if it'll get down to two percent. I don't think it really matters. I think the most global economies outside of perhaps China are going to go into a recession and it will be a shallow …”

“Five years ago, we were comfortable investing in China. Today, we're not.”

“You actually want to be investing in Asia for one simple reason. If the driving force in Asia is China, And that driving force is growing by five percent a year. Do you think that's beneficial for the region? Yes. But people look at your question, geopolitical…”

“We've sort of defaulted to eight to 10% of the portfolio, which is probably underweight relative to GDP, but probably bad on when you look at market cap and percentage of total private equity. So I think we're kind of neutral, but we're not abandoning the fiel…”

“We talked to our clients not that long ago about a few Chinese stocks we were finding. We had never owned anything in China for decades. It was in favor. Everybody was lining up to go there. I knew that they have a pretty authoritarian system of governance and…”

“There are certainly some left tail scenarios to investing in China that weren't there a few years ago. But on the other hand, you may be getting paid to take those risks right now, and I don't think it's a moment to rush for the exits.”

“We learned that there's a lot of risk other than equity beta in these portfolios, ok? China, there's geopolitical risk, and Biotech, there's basic regulatory risk, small company size risk, unprofitable or profit tomorrow company risk, and all of those are risk…”

“We think about it a lot, and where it's come out for us is that we've gotten a lot more liquid in China, so we've not really spent a lot of time on illiquid investments. We're not quite sure the illiquidity premium is there for all the risks that we're bearing…”

“And obviously, China is increasingly a black box. It's very hard to do due diligence there. In fact, they've arrested people for it.”

“When you then look at valuation in China on the sovereign US dollar bonds, we've realized that it's not attractive for us. So we don't have investments in China.”

“In the hard currency investment universe, and in the MB, there's probably around 4.5%. So China is a much smaller part than it is in most asset classes”

“There are quite a number of industries where China is really booming, particularly in the whole energy transition supply chain, which is an area that we Think about a lot, partly as a business opportunity also in relation to our sustainable investment agenda. …”

“There used to be a time where you'd see something happening in China, let's say, and then a few years later, you'd see it in Southeast Asia, or you'd see something happen in the US, and then a couple of years later, you see it in Europe. The cadence behind tha…”

“We can see what's happened in China, where almost 40 years ago, no one had diabetes, and now they have the most people with diabetes in the world.”

“But second, they've gone from having 23 to twenty-five million children born a year to less than 10. So they've had a 60% reduction in the number of children born.”

“We're not going to invest in China. We're not going to invest in the Far East. Not going to go to Latin America. Certainly not Russia. We will only invest in places where the rule of law is recognized.”

“Private sector debt to GDP in India is like, 53%. I think in China it's a 195%.”

“India's largest bank is smaller than China's 11th largest bank. Its largest six private sector banks put together are one seventh the size of ICBC.”

“About five percent of the companies are majority government owned. I think in China, it's 30 or 40 or more percent.”

“China's GDP growth has been 16 X versus eight X for India, but China's index performance on that 16 X GDP growth has been two and a half X, and India's index performance on that eight X GDP growth has also been eight X.”

“We've had the same country managers in Japan, in China, in India, Korea, and Australia from the very beginning, and we've been there for 20 plus years”

“And that is one important reason, among many others, why I continue to maintain that I think from a tactical and a strategic point of view, but most emphatically from a policy point of view, the prudent allocation to stocks of companies domiciled in China is z…”

“Starting with China's admission to WTO in 2001 of the great policy mistakes I I think this country has ever made.”

“99.9% of the world's lithium reserves are in the hands of just four countries, China, Chile, Argentina, Australia, none of which are the United States.”

“China controls over 90% of the rare earth refining capacity.”

“You could imagine this hyper US exceptionalism dragging the rest of the world to do things that they've been reluctant to do. That's the most bullish scenario from a geopolitical and an economic perspective.”

“The changing relationship between some of the bigger countries like the U S and China and with the new administration coming in, we think many of those themes will be supercharged and again, result in a higher volatility And I think more challenging returns fo…”

“India's exciting theme for us, so we have probably as much unfunded commitment there as we do in China.”

“We peaked at a total portfolio exposure in China of 38% in late twenty-twenty, which is a big number. Today, as we sit here, we're about 19 or 20%.”

“In fact, our portfolio in China over the last 10 years produced a hundred and sixty million of excess liquidity. One hundred and sixty million distributions over capital calls over the last decade in our China book.”

“It's hard to compare India to China for many reasons, but the demographics are far superior. I think 50% of Indians are under 30 years old. I think it's 32% of Chinese.”

“Those GDP numbers are all wrong, by the way, but they're directionally correct.”

“So we put pencils down. We haven't stopped looking. We haven't stopped investing entirely in China, but our allocation pacing has changed dramatically.”

“It's not easy because there can be screaming opportunities and China might be perfect example today where intellectually a lot of CIOs know these valuations are getting unjustifiably cheap. But back to career risk. They don't want to walk in, in front of their…”

“I think if he gets a deal with China, which I think he will, I don't think that's good for US assets relative to the rest of the world.”

“This, I think, will end up being the negotiations with China. China, you get out of the Americas, and we'll get out of Asia. That is a trade that Xi Jinping will be very happy to make.”

“Now the U.S. Is doing fiscal consolidation just as China and Europe step on the fiscal accelerator.”

“Nor, as Louis would attest, does the convenient but incorrect rumor that, oh, China must be bashing treasuries. Just ignore that.”

“China doesn't need a devaluation. China's problem is first and foremost that consumer and business confidence has been crushed.”

“The odds of that succeeding are probably very low, and the Chinese are trying to be much more relaxed about it.”

“James, I think here we're at a super interesting crossroad where if in the next six months China does devalue the renminbi, it would have been a big policy mistake.”

“Look, China's running a trade surplus of 1.1 trillion US dollars.”

“We also know that when China enters the room, profits walk out, so there's not going to be any profit in AI forever.”

“The one that stands out the most to me is Chinese distressed debt. Chinese distressed debt was trading at 50, 60 cents on the dollar. When Russia invaded Ukraine, everybody decided China's uninvestable. Everybody redeemed. There was no markets. This stuff is s…”

“In the last month or two, there's been a shift in that, more towards restriction of the sale of Venezuelan oil to the U.S., In practice, what it's doing is pushing it to China, which is odd, because that would seem counter to the U.S. Objectives.”

“Africa tends to do quite well when the commodity cycle is strong. They benefit. There's an argument to be made that it is an easier China play than China itself.”

“And recently we have scaled back over the past few years, we actually scaled back our allocation to emerging markets. It's still reasonably large compared to many funds. I think we're about 15%, but it's not as large as it once was. And a lot of our appetite f…”

“The idea was that 50, 60% of cars were going to be electric. And that's happened in China. But when we hit about 10% in the US, it hit a wall.”

“The only thing that's been interesting to watch has been China, because two, three years ago, China was going to be out of portfolios. Then you have a year where Chinese stocks perform really well, and now these things are cyclical. The U.S.-China relationship…”

“There was a period of time where of all the private money being invested in emerging markets around the world, 90% of that money went to Asia, of which 90% went to China. This concentration, 81% of all private investing money In emerging markets flowed to one …”

“Since then, China went from the darling to uninvestable to today. It's a trade. It's not an investment.”

“Now, if you look at equities, the MSCI global, Korea, China, India, Brazil, make up 70 plus percent of that index. So you are actually buying a very concentrated exposure, not a very diversified exposure.”

“So if you say, well, I'm just going to invest in China and India because these are the largest economies, It's a mistake because it's not your job to support large economies. It's your job to make money. Putting that many eggs in so few baskets doesn't make se…”

“There's at least 10,000 private equity firms in China.”

“If you look at the amount of ethylene and propylene that they're bringing on, and then go to 20 30 and shut all of the European and Japanese capacity, in 2030, you'd have more over capacity than you have now.”

“Our focus on China and India, it's a big chunk of our 52% that's venture.”

“Those days are over in the sense of there's a lot of things telling you that there's not really going to be the next two hundred billion dollar company, or at least it's harder to get there.”

“China will have a big advantage in robotics as they have the use cases right there, ready to go.”

“There really isn't a small fund market. The smaller funds in China are still a couple hundred million dollars. Yeah, there's some really small ones, but you just don't have this solo capital world.”

“Right now it's the least crowded trade in the world is China venture.”

“Our portfolio probably looks a little bit different in that there's a lot of things that we've decided to not spend our time on. Because we believed we'd be better spent spending time elsewhere. Things like private credit, China, Latin America, Africa.”

“We backed him day one when he launched his own fund, Composite Capital. Within two years, he had stopped investing in China and pivoted his portfolio hard towards Vietnam.”

“That particular risk is one of the hugely cascading impact that would be felt across the portfolio because so much of the public and private markets are linked to the AI build out. There's no part of the portfolio that wouldn't be severely impacted by that.”

“Luxury hasn't done well recently, but I think a lot of that's because you've had a demand source in China drying up and alternative luxury brands being developed in China.”

“They have more appetite and more willingness to take the longer China bet than we might because we're going to die at some point and somebody else is going to be responsible for the endowment.”

“Even for developed countries in other places where I always point to the UK, it's 40 cents a kilowatt hour is the energy price versus China where it's eight cents or the US where it's between 12 and 16 cents.”

“Even more recently, the Chinese approach into Africa has not been an aid-driven approach. It's more of investment. Both of these models have their problems.”