From June 28, 2022, to Feb. 8, 2024, two of China’s most well-known stock indices, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Index and Hong Kong’s Hang Sang Index, have lost 20 percent and 28 percent of their value, respectively. And this is after the Chinese Communist Party completed $278 billion in stock purchases to stem the recent rout.
There is a consensus among experts that China is in deep economic difficulty. Paramount leader Xi Jinping has centralized power and curbed capitalistic freedom in China. It’s difficult to know anything with certainty about the nation’s economic stagnation, since China recently outlawed the release of corporate or economic information and stopped releasing basic economic reports.
Even so, there is one sector of the international financial analyst community that still confidently issues opinions on publicly traded Chinese stocks: the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings firms — to their everlasting shame and embarrassment.
I warned about the false picture that ESG ratings provide regarding corporations in June 2022, by comparing a publicly traded American firm, a Texas-based oil and gas royalties company known as Brigham Minerals and, since a merger, now known as Sitio (NYSE:STR), with three Chinese stocks in the energy sector.
The Chinese securities — not stocks in the U.S. sense as they don’t provide legal ownership of the Chinese companies, which are merely vehicles for China to attract foreign capital — were Xinyi Solar Holdings (OTC: XISHY), China Resources Gas Group (OTC: CGASY), and China Coal Energy Company (OTC: CCOZF).
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