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Beijing’s pledge to ‘boost the economy’ acknowledged investors’ top concerns



Stock prices in Hong Kong and China’s mainland soared Wednesday after China’s State Council promised to shore up the nation’s wobbly financial markets by easing a regulatory crackdown on technology companies, providing new support for property developers, and boosting the broader economy.To get more China finance news, you can visit shine news official website.

China’s benchmark CSI 300 Index gained 4.3%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index jumped 9.1%, its best day since the 2008 global financial crisis, while the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, which tracks Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong, surged 12.5%. The share prices of China’s two largest internet companies, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, shot up more than 20%.

The rally followed a report from China’s official Xinhua news agency on a Wednesday meeting of the China Financial Stability and Development Committee (FSDC) led by Vice Premier Liu He. The FSDC is China’s most powerful financial policy body. Liu is the nation’s senior economic planner and a direct adviser to President Xi Jinping.

The committee exhorted all government departments to “actively introduce policies that benefit markets,” according to the report, and agreed that there was an urgent need to “boost the economy” in the first quarter of 2022.
China’s desire to escape the shadow of the U.S. dollar and build an alternative infrastructure for global finance is being stymied by one major factor: Its reluctance to loosen the shackles around its own currency. By creating the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS, back in 2015, the Chinese financial authorities had hoped to provide a way for companies and individuals to keep money flowing internationally — even if China were ever to come under the same kind of economic pressure Western countries are currently meting out to Russia, following its invasion of Ukraine. The problem is that CIPS has neither the scope nor the technical capability to match its Western counterpart — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), often described as the Gmail of the global banking system. In late February, the U.S. and EU took the drastic step of cutting Russian banks off from SWIFT, making it much harder for Russian banks to participate