I have a new hero.
Gao Xiqing, the president of the China Investment Corporation and the man responsible for the most important $200 billion of China’s US asset holdings, is now being featured in an exclusive Atlantic interview about the financial meltdown and the US market.
And, my goodness, the man is awesome.
This article is definitely worth your time, and I’ll include a few snippets below to entice you to click through.
On stock market derivatives:
If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bulls***. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.
On American wealth, and comically, the root of this derivative evil:
Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.” So you have all these clever people going into financial engineering, where they come up with all these complicated products to sell to people.
On American supremacy/arrogance:
It hurts to think, Okay, now we have to be on equal footing to other people. “On equal footing” would necessarily mean that sometimes you have to stoop to appear to be humble to other people.
