China whacks Alibaba with US$2.8bn fine for breaking antitrust rules Alibaba has humbly accepted that it broke China's antitrust laws and will pay a colossal fine. Chinese authorities fined Alibaba Group US$2.77bn on Saturday, the largest antitrust penalty Beijing has ever issued. The fine represents four percent of Alibaba's most recent full-year earnings. China’s State Administration for …
Does anyone with a good understanding of China know if this ruling is genuine? It reads exactly like an article that would have come from, say, an FTC ruling. The cynical part of me feels that the CCP already have less visible controls over their companies and that this may be more for show than action?
I think it is genuine.
Jack Ma has been too critical of the government of late, and when you look for him on the internet you'll see that the authorities have come down like a tonne of bricks on him and his businesses.
So it's less of a warning to other companies over how much money they make or how they compete in the market, and more of a threat to the chairman of those companies to think about what they say about their beloved Winnie The Pooh leader - and even then say nothing.
The CCP is bad, very bad, in so many ways, but not so much as far as the economy.
They are not the USSR with a centrally planned economy. In fact they are the second fastest growing trillion dollar economy in the world after India. They have encouraged capitalism. Beijing has more billionaires than any other city in the world. But, unlike the current West, they are willing to effectively regulate companies beyond just fines, including forcing divestitures, stopping mergers, and stopping IPOs.
I have no doubt that politics played a role in the size of the fine but I also have no doubt that the same is true in the West.
this is nothing to do with "being critical of the government" but the fact that Ma was trying to wrestle the ability to give credit ("printing money" for the goldbugs amongst us) away from the state.
unregulated credit (a policy introduced in the early 70s in the UK) is responsible, amongst other things, for insane house price inflation as the banksters are only too happy to have indebted people chained to their benches for fear of losing their houses.
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