(Bloomberg) -- The top bosses from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley called for greater transparency from China and for eased movement of capital to restore the appetite of global investors.
While acknowledging there were some “green shoots” now being seen in the Chinese economy, Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer Ted Pick said there was still need for greater transparency in Chinese regulations and policy making.
Battling deflation will take time, he said at Hong Kong’s third annual Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit. “The name of the game is to reignite consumer confidence,” he said.
Speaking on the same panel, his counterpart at Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, said there was still a combination of issues that has kept global investors from deploying capital in the world’s second-largest economy.
Given the difficulty over the past five years to get capital out, “I think messages around the ability to both attract capital, and have capital come in and come out are very important for global investors,” he said.
As in the past three years, the summit attracted a who’s who of global finance, also including the heads of Apollo Global Management Inc. and Blackstone Inc. The conference was started to revive Hong Kong’s status as an international financial center during the height of the pandemic and after years of political unrest. It coincided on Tuesday with the sentencing in a Hong Kong court of 45 pro-democracy activists, including former youth leader Joshua Wong, over holding unofficial primary polls in 2020.
Solomon and Pick spoke after China’s policymakers and top regulators vowed at an earlier panel to continue the nation’s opening up to foreign investors and firms, in their first public appearances with global financial luminaries at a major conference in Hong Kong.
“We welcome foreign investors to invest in China and share the dividends of China’s economic development,” Deputy Governor of the People’s Bank of China Zhu Hexin said. China will continue to deepen mutual market access with Hong Kong and optimize connect programs for stocks, bonds and wealth management products and actively support Hong Kong to develop its offshore yuan market, he said.
Chinese officials have ratcheted up the frequency of interactions with global banks to gather their perspectives on the nation’s stimulus measures. The securities regulator has especially had an interest in revisions global banks make to their economic forecasts and analyzing daily flows to understand foreign investment trends, people familiar with the matter said.
Policymakers have rolled out a raft of stimulus measures since September to put the domestic economy back on its feet, followed by a promise to use more “forceful” fiscal policies next year to drive growth.
Innovation
Huang Yiping, a member of the monetary policy committee of the central bank, said that while China’s measures so far are “aggressive” enough to turn around the macro economy, there’s still room for policy improvement.
Local governments remained fiscally constrained and their moves to create more revenue are hurting entrepreneur confidence, said Huang, adding China should also push to have innovation in more industries as it seeks to boost productivity.
He echoed regulators’ call for more opening up.
“We need to keep the country open, because you can’t imagine that you can do all innovation by closing the door despite all these geopolitical tensions.”
The initial spate of monetary easing, which included cutting a short term policy rate and interests on existing mortgages, has started to filter through the economy with data for October showing a rebound in consumption. President Xi Jinping had expressed “full confidence” in meeting China’s 2024 growth target of about 5%.
At the same time, Donald Trump’s reelection as US president is once again raising the prospects of harsher tariffs on Chinese goods. It might further accelerate global firms to set up additional manufacturing and logistics throughout Asia, which has been dubbed the China plus one strategy.
HSBC Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Georges Elhedery said that “China plus one has created “a material virtuous circle” in Asia.
The bank expects to see intra-Asia flows increase by 65%, he said.
There are “many challenges” that China is facing and the high dollar is putting pressure on currencies in the region, Elhedery said. The Hong Kong dollar is faced with a high rate environment due to the peg, despite a slowing economy, he said.
(Adds comments from HSBC at the end.)
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