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Strategies & Market Trends : The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (2093)	3/17/2019 2:28:09 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	1 Recommendation Recommended By elmatador Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13781

The Obama administration / FBI / national security came to believe the best way to deal with unacceptable activities by China and China associated companies is through criminal prosecution. This was a fairly logical outcome as virtually all of the unacceptable activities are illegal. For better or worse, the Trump administration has largely stepped-away from this effort, most notably with ZTE, and have replaced this with diplomatic pressure on allies considering the use of Chinese technology, and import tariffs on Chinese goods and services. Trump's bully approach is more satisfying to many, but I can't say I'm confident it will prove more successful than criminal prosecution of outliers. As a result I'm not sure there's any consensus on what to do with Huawei. Until proven otherwise, Huawei is an arm of the PLA. Ren Zhengfei has always maintained the fiction that his employees own Huawei, but no employee when they retire has ever benefited from this alleged ownership. It's equally clear that Ren himself does not own Huawei any more than Russian Oligarchs own their companies. Putin has a dictum that the guy who tends the nest is entitled to benefit from his work and position, but he doesn't mean he owns the nest. So until the alternate ownership of Huawei is given some official documentation, Huawei is considered to be owned by the Chinese military. Few would buy communications equipment from the US military or the Russian military, and buying from the Chinese military is no different. Many operators like Deutsche-Telekom have offered their low-end phones. I bought a Huawei Ascend in Germany for 95 € eight years ago because my phone didn't work in Europe. That's typical. Not offering these phones and not using Huawei as a vendor, someone they've never used, is not such a problem. Die Bahn seems determined for now to use Huawei, but this is just a ploy to obtain more money from the German government. Huawei's mere existence is creating problems for the T-Mobile Sprint merger because Softbank owns 70% of Sprint and Softbank has close ties to Huawei. Prior to approving the merger, the US government wants to limit Softbank's representation on the Board of the merged company and find a way to strictly prohibit any information about T-Mobile-Sprint and their vendors from being passed back to Huawei through Softbank. In many less wealthy countries Huawei's cheaper prices are attractive to the point of almost being essential. This "Huawei problem" is reminiscent of China building and outfitting the headquarters for the African Congress. Very generous, but they discovered it came with hidden surveillance equipment and network switches which "phoned home to China" every evening transferring the information that had carried. One might think China, having seen the USSR and US pull these sort of stunts to their own detriment, would have given China cause to act differently - but they seem to have doubled down on their own right to imperialism. Their actions in the Spratley Islands are doing them damage around the world no enemy could have hoped to accomplish.