Brian Kruger:
Welcome back to the Common Bridge. We have a real treat for you today, and this might be in multiple parts. This is a conversation that Rich had with Chinese hedge fund manager, Aaron Boesky a couple of days ago. And Boesky is an interesting guy. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He was a graduate of Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business and he completed his postgraduate studies at Beijing Foreign Affairs College in Oakland University in 2004, he founded the Marco Polo Investments and Marco Polo Pure Asset Management. And that group became the world’s first dedicated Shanghai A share hedge fund management team offered to foreigners. And today it has one of the longest running track records focused on the Shanghai market.
Boesky speaks English and he speaks Mandarin Chinese…probably be speaking English for our podcast. He’s been dedicated to the Chinese markets for the last two decades or about 19 years. You’ve probably seen him on Bloomberg Television. He presents to numerous industry conferences and he’s been the subject of a lot…really actually been interviewed for a lot of publications on the subject of the Chinese Shanghai A share market around the world. This is a great conversation though, but bear with us because, Rich is actually talking to him from Hong Kong. So bear with any of the sound quality issues you have. But anyway, this is great. Rich starts out by asking him how this all got started.
Rich Helppie:
How’d you get to China? I think it was Brazil you were looking at and then you selected China.
Aaron Boesky:
In terms of my own background, my story coming out to China was, it was an exciting story about immigration. I looked at my grandparents and great grandparents and there were always these rumored stories of romantic, idealistic crossing of the ocean, and Ellis Island and starting rags to riches type of original American dream type of a vibe. And it was off of that emotion that I decided that I just wanted to try it myself somewhere else, because the moment that I started to sort of put that outfit on, that dream of going to a foreign place like my forefathers did when they came to the US and learning a different language and learning the geography and the culture and starting your own way, whatever that was going to be. I really didn’t know what I was going to get into when I went out and I didn’t know where I was going to go.
The original decision was just to leave the US, not because I didn’t love it, but because I wanted something exciting and motivating. When you’re getting out of university, you hit that period where you’re not getting the respect that people who are established, in their mid thirties and in corporate America or whatever, trade that they’re applying in the world. It’s hard when you’re in your twenties to find your way and get excited. The moment that I started envisioned myself in a foreign place, speaking a different language, the challenge of it all, that’s when I knew-the moment that occurred to me, that I could replicate what our forefathers did when they came to the US. China, of all the places that I had looked at, just it offered everything. It had the tremendous growth and upside, and it was very exotic and unique and different. I also was very attracted by the culture in general. I find the Chinese and Asian nations and cultures, generally speaking, to be very industrious, pragmatic, and business focused, which is how I was raised and the way my mind works. So it was just a perfect fit at the perfect time. So it’s been now 17 years. I did three years in Mandarin and three years just general Chinese anthropology and history. When I arrived in China, I was already speaking a moderate amount of Mandarin and I already had a pretty good base of education.
When I touched down, I had already prepared for about two years, three years. And it was from the moment I landed, one of the most exciting journeys or life anyone could lead. I am a big fan of this topic that we’re going to be talking about, which is effectively, globalization. And that’s, to me, what the whole thing is about. I think people in general, should be doing business around the world. By sharing cultures and by interchanging ideas and information and movement of people. It’s highly beneficial for everybody. And I’m very pro-trade as a general stance, and I’m really excited to be talking about this.
Rich Helppie:
We’re very excited to have you on. And with the Common Bridge, people want to understand about policy, they want to understand how does this work. So we’re going to get a little bit in depth with that. And I believe you’re a person that is indeed on the front lines of what’s happening with US trade policy with the second largest economy in the world, in China. Do you mind taking a minute or two just to explain what you do with Marco Polo and particularly how you diligence companies, the way that you get inside. You look at the people, you look at the integrity of their books, their market, their competitors, how they run their supply lines. It is really, I believe, part of what gives you such credibility to talk about how this international economy runs. So if you don’t mind a little bit about what you do at Marco Polo, particularly how you’re got this viewpoint into the real economy.
Aaron Boesky:
So when I had originally got going in China, the opportunity of the Shanghai stock market, which houses almost 4,000 companies most of which are liquid, unlike, say, the Indian stock market were only maybe 1,550 names are really traded. The Shanghai stock market which is where we trade Shanghai and Shenzhen, it’s sort of like NASDAQ in New York. We have two major forces. But we operate a fund for the last 15 years. We were the first fund and fund management company ever launched that offered access by a specialized fund to enter for foreign foreign capital and foreign investors in the US and Europe to participate in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market. At that time when we launched, it was a Chinese woman who’s been my partner now for 15 plus years. And we were part of a test program. It was not even really…I would call it a pilot test, of foreign capital being traded. I mean, when we took our capital in, and we raised most of our capital from American investors, and when we…it was small, we’re talking five, ten million in year one. And we didn’t even know if we were going to be able to get our money out. That’s how risky it was. But it was so exciting and our passion, Chris and myself, for the opportunity and ultimately the learning experience that the next 15 years would bring, which hopefully I can share some of the things that I’ve learned along the way. So what we did is we deploy and manage actively, just like you would in the US stock market, the Shanghai stock market. We have trade volumes in our market, in us dollar terms on a daily basis sometimes, which are triple the New York stock exchange. You might want to let that soak in for a second.
Rich Helppie:
That is a very impressive number. And you touched on some of the risks in the Chinese market in that it was fairly opaque. You couldn’t really understand how good company A was versus company B, but I think that’s a code that you cracked through some very hard work.
Aaron Boesky:
Well, on the micro side I have to credit my partner because she’s been driving for 15 years-the process. Her background was as an auditor at Price Waterhouse Coopers for five or six years prior and she had a specialization in Chinese companies and was trained from birth, I would say almost, to interface in the way that she does today, which is, she’s very skeptical and she’s very aware of of accounting practices. She’s a CPA. She was educated in Australia, trained at Price Waterhouse and she-right away I saw the opportunity of the Shanghai opening this test program and allowing foreigners into the market for the first time. I wanted that opportunity, but I knew that I needed someone who had a decade or so of auditing experience on Chinese companies. And it’s funny that you brought that up right away because that was the biggest fear that I had, knowing that I was going to be entrusted from my peers in the US-investors and friends and family originally-that were going to say, hey, do you know what you’re putting your money into? What are these companies really, how much fraud is going on? What we learned over the 15 years was that public companies in the Shanghai market and in China, they’re a lot cleaner than you would suspect. The public markets, and I can’t speak about what goes on with private companies, but the transparency we get, it’s quarterly reporting. And it was basically the only market in Asia that was quarterly reporting when we launched back around 2003. Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, none of those were quarterly reporting. We were getting quarterly reporting pursuant to IFRS standards. Everything was being provided. Now underneath those numbers, you know, how, how much could you trust? I can say that in 15 years we’ve very rarely seen a case of a company that was found to be fraudulent.
Rich Helppie:
We really want to work in fundamentals and starting with why should Americans care about us China trade. And I know I do have some listeners in Europe and to the extent it affects them. We’ve been trading with China for hundreds of years and it’s not something new. And so what problems have we been trying to solve with better trade deals? If you read the American press we’ve had job off-shoring and currency manipulation charges, and the theft of intellectual property, threats to US core industries, product dumping, predatory pricing, pursuit of minerals around the world in unfair ways. So if you wouldn’t mind spending a little time on, what’s the backdrop, what are we trying to solve? And then maybe just in recent history, what have been some of the past policy approaches that have been taken with China? Pre-dating 2017.
Aaron Boesky:
I would say to really come at that, if you really want to look at what’s going on today in this trade conflict, the best way to start,without going back hundreds of years, and that’s an exciting story in itself, in which I’m well versed. But in recent history, I think that it really all started in the Kissinger, Nixon visits in China and that set the tone for everything that transpired afterwards. So at that time we were very concerned that China and Russia were expanding their political ideology across the world and that we would effectively be overrun by that. And so that was a big motivation for us. We saw that there was a rift between China and Russia. One of the main reasons that there was a rift between the two communist parties at that time, was that communism failed. In China there are about 20 million people died of starvation. The great leap forward, and they learned the hard way, that that system doesn’t work. And Deng Xiaoping, he’s probably the most notable and important political figure in my memory of China. And he has one very famous quote, which is “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it gets the mouse”, which is-China realized it doesn’t matter if you want to call this communism, capitalism. We just want to eat. We want to survive and succeed. And he basically said, let’s drop the dogma and let’s just figure out how we can make it. And that began that concept, and that emotion was brokered between the US and China. I’m under Nixon and Kissinger. And it set up a relationship between us and China in an effort to bring them to our way of life and not to the Russian way of life.
And that was the basis of the friendship and the partnership that began. And the way that it went forward from there throughout Reagan, Bush, Clinton, all the way until Trump, the general tone was, we’re going to help you guys. We’re going to educate you on how to do it. We’re going to show you how to build the financing system, your banking system. We were the partners that showed them the way, and we also financed them. So, we were backing them to come to our way of life and we felt that by bringing China online into a capitalistic structure, would be beneficial across the board. That they would become a country that speaks our language from a business perspective, and more and more a political perspective culturally. And if you look at what’s happened, if you looked at China then, and you look at China now, we succeeded.
You go around China now, even in the almost 20 years that I’ve been moving around, the shift towards our way-as much as they could-they’re still a very different culture. We could discuss that for a long time I’m sure. But the interface, the way that they do business, private companies, just the whole system is a copy in a lot of ways of our system. And when I say copy, which is a very important word in this trade dispute, I want to be clear that we were incentivizing them and encouraging them to copy our way.
Rich Helppie:
Were we also incentivizing them to copy our software and just take it?
Aaron Boesky:
Well now, this psychology is what led up to transgressions, which did occur in recent times. But the idea was-we’ll turn our head and cough and look the other way while they take and steal, you could say, or copy various aspects of our way of life. It might be how we do an assembly line, how we…things that you can’t even patent. Just we were very happy to see them coming our way and not going the way of communist Russia at that time. And so for two decades, three decades, we knew that they were taking stuff and not paying for it. In the US you can’t just take a guy’s hard work, whatever it might be, his toothpaste formula or whatever, you can’t just take those things, you have to pay licensing and patents and whatever else, to compensate people.
And that’s one of the big advantages of the entire American system, was the protection of individuals, the protection of ideas and businesses. The problem ultimately became-was that they started to blur the line. Everyone was blurring the line. We…there was no line originally, there was just this, we’re going to turn our head and you guys copy us and become American and it’s all gonna be good because you won’t be Russian. And that was fine until it just started to just be too much. I mean, if you look at things before Trump did what he did-and I think that this was going long before Trump-the US Senate has been pounding their fists about these issues for about five or ten years prior to Trump. So this whole thing isn’t new. The main issue here is that American innovation is our advantage.
We can’t allow countries, no matter who they are, how much we want to be friends with them, or we want them to not be our enemy, we can’t give away what we do best. And we had to stand up for ourselves at some point and say, hey, look, we helped you guys out, we got you up and running. But now that you’re up and running, you’ve got to play by the rules. And I think that this whole dispute-and I’m not politically charged either way, I’m definitely more on the commercial side of things-but I think that the time was right to draw the line now and say, hey, we gave you-we basically gave them a free ride just so that they could get going. And now they’re going, so why should they get free Windows when I have to pay for it? It’s not fair. It’s not fair to Bill Gates or whoever. So at the end of the day the time was right for a renegotiation of our relationship. It had to happen. And I would say that the only core issue in truth is the theft of technologies and patents and ideas and not paying for them. That is the core main transgression that has occurred.
Rich Helppie:
It’s not about soybeans and tariffs and who gets to buy steel from whom? Because this is the way some of the reporting has gone on. And I don’t think there was a great deal of understanding about the Trans-pacific Partnership, although, when Trump rejected that agreement, there was a great wailing and there was going to be the, I think it was, the end of this hemisphere. What was good about the Trans-pacific Partnership and, and what was flawed about it? And are we onto a better way now that that doesn’t exist?
Aaron Boesky:
I think that the best way forward period, is having a fair and level playing field where, individuals and businesses can compete on a fair basis. Let the hardest workers win, or the most organized, or the most talented, or the brightest. There’s so many ways that a sports team can be great, or a company can be special. And we’ve learned in seeing the greatest free markets system ever created and what it can create. In just 150 years of the American experiment, we essentially innovated and created the entire modern world. And you have to stop for a moment in all this malaise about Trans-pacific Partnerships and jobs and steel and soybeans, and say to yourself, oh my God, we made the telephone, the television, the airplane-we fly, we made the computer, the satellite, decoded DNA. You look at how much has come out of America in such a short period of time, no other empire, no other nation has even come remotely close in terms of the outpouring of life changing innovation that’s changed everybody’s life on this planet, from people in African fields to Russian Siberia.
The world has been driven in the last 150 years by the result of fair competition created in the US which protected innovation. And that has changed everything. That’s the formula. I think that this conflict is very important because it’s gonna set the stage for China to play by the rules. And the result of that is going to be another huge wave of innovation. And that’s something I wanted to hit on going into this talk, which is the innovation, now already. So when this kicked off, we’re now two and a half years into the rumblings when it began. And right away-threats. The background was that when Schumer and Trump and the Senate just decided this is it, we’re going to draw the line on these guys. It’s got to stop-the theft. When they came down, the tariffs and the soybeans and, and all those other conversations that they got thrown into it as weapons to force the Chinese to stop stealing the tech. And again, I want to be clear, the guilt isn’t entirely the Chinese. We encouraged it in the seventies, eighties and nineties. So both sides are guilty in terms of what ended up happening, but it had to stop now and it is stopped-stopping now. So, about two and a half years ago when this started, Xi Jinping made a huge push for innovation in China so that they wouldn’t be reliant on the United States for certain technologies. And this is going to be probably very interesting for your listeners and for yourself, which is-I don’t know how much you know about the microchip, but the microchip is really the one thing that the Chinese could never copy.
Rich Helppie:
Why is that?
Aaron Boesky:
It, the microchip, is actually at the heart of, and I mean the center of, the entire conflict. So China could pretty easily-they learned not even by using hackers or anything-they could just reverse engineer pretty much anything that we were doing. But the problem is when you’re talking about microchips-so the microchip is the heart of technology. So your phone, the outside of it, the glass, there’s companies that make glass. The metal case, there’s companies that make metal. The heart and the brain of the entire thing is the microchip. And to produce microchips that are competitive, that can process so that you’re looking at a touch screen, and flipping through and down…I mean the amount of processing that’s going on there in order to produce a chip that can compete, you have to have multidisciplinary-I don’t know if you’ve ever seen like a television show or anything of a chip foundry, but the amount of disciplines that go into actually creating a chip at like negative 500 Celsius, you have to have like physics and chemistry and quantum. The amount of disciplines that go into producing chips on a competitive basis, next generation, next generation, next generation, the Chinese could never catch up. Trump and the Senate threatened to cut China off on chip delivery. That was what caused the conflict. So the only weapon we really had that scared them, was if we cut off semi-conductor delivery to China, we send them to the dark ages effectively, because the only chip foundries that they’ve even attempted, SMIC, which was a money pit for about 50 billion US that couldn’t make a chip. That’s 10 years behind where we’re at right now. So that’s what triggered everything was that we started to threaten the banning of high tech exports to China, namely the semi-conductor. That was the big poker chip that we had. The tariffs weren’t even remotely as threatening as cutting off high-tech exports. The high-tech export ban, which was proposed by the Senate and Trump multiple times, was such a nuclear option in terms of the effect it would have on China. Because the only other foundries that have the capability are Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, all of which are licensed by us and garrisoned by us.
So if we wanted to cut the semiconductors, it would have sent China to the dark ages. So it was a huge threat. And we ended up settling on tariffs, which is a much less penalizing result for them. And the tariffs ended up being much more of a slap on the wrist because all they really did was shift their currency and depreciate it to offset the tariffs. It really didn’t have much of an effect. It had some effect, but it wasn’t the most that we could do to them. I just want to be clear that the US did hold back the nuclear option, and the tariffs actually were a way of compromising, in terms of our threat.
Rich Helppie:
With our competing educational systems, it would say that the next frontier that we’re looking at 5G, and I don’t know that anyone really appreciates the magnitude of what this is going to mean for life on this planet. On some of these earlier podcasts we’ve talked about artificial intelligence and big data engines and what that can do for life on this planet in terms of, medical care, warfare, commerce. But 5G, is-I can’t even get my head around the magnitude of the changes. And I look at China’s trying to get there. We’re trying to get there as you know, US economy. Who’s best equipped to get to 5G?
Aaron Boesky:
That is a great example of what competition can do now that China’s being held to account on their behavior. And we’re really challenged. 5G is the first challenge. So it’s really…this is the first showdown between the US and China, now that China’s on their own. So we’ve cut them off. We really have at this point and they know it. The big challenge that’s right in front of us in terms of the next 18 months is 5G. There will be many challenges going forward between these two powers, as long as we can keep the competition on a fair playing field, I think the benefit of the competition will go to us, the consumer and the people. Because you look at what’s happening with 5G because America knows the competition is on. It reminds me a lot of the space race with Russia. When you have that kind of competition, you get to the moon in five years. We never would have made it to the moon if it wasn’t for Russia. And that’s the kind of atmosphere that’s coming out of this. And it’s exactly what we could have hoped for, which is there’s no war. We’re getting back to business. And this time it’s a competition. It’s not just them copying us and it’s a fair competition.
Rich Helppie:
It sounds like from your description. And so Aaron, in this first phase, as been reported, what’s in there? What is some of the foundational pieces of that agreement, and also what might be in a second or third phase where do we go from here? What’s there the first phase and where do we go from here?
Aaron Boesky:
Look, the mechanics of the agreements and the frameworks-internally, at Marco polo we’ve been looking at what’s the framework going to look like? We’ve been looking at that for 12 months before this came out. How are they going to do this and what kind of impacts is it going to have on companies? But I would say that the point now is that the moment of us going-we’re putting our foot down-the way things were, it’s over. It was like a breakup. The important thing is that moment’s now behind us, the line was drawn. They’re well aware. The whole world is well aware at this point that China’s got to stand on their own two feet. That is the basis of this negotiation.
As long as that reality maintains true, what you’re going to see in each one of these subsequent trade agreements is you’re going to see an easing of the tariff situation. Obviously that’s going to come down very quickly, I would assume within 12 months you’re going to see tariffs back at whatever levels they were pre-Trump in certain categories. I think that any people or industries that were impacted by that were essentially either beneficiaries or casualties to the conflict. Things are going to revert from a policy perspective back to where they were. But the change is that the competition is on, the game is on now. It really is a competition now and it’s, I would say, a friendly competition. It was a bit uncomfortable here being an American over here for the past 18 months. It was the breakup-very uncomfortable moment, but you can feel in the market already in the last six months that there was sort of an acknowledgment in higher circles, in economics and in trade that it had to happen and it’s going to be best for everybody because China’s going to stand up now and they’re going to compete and they’re going to innovate and we’re all gonna win. And you’re seeing it already. 5G you alluded to-huge example. I don’t know if your listeners, or even yourself, really know what 5G can do. It is a pretty mind blowing technology because what it is, is for the first time ever, they’ve developed a language that chips are going to be speaking to each other. So it’s all about the internet of things, IOT. And one of the big arguments with the competition with China and the US is the language that the chips are going to be speaking. So what’ll happen is, is you’ll have a Dell desktop monitor and you’ll have a, GE air conditioning thermostat, and these things are going to be speaking to one another-regularly. So like when you’re walking into a hotel, you’ll get to the elevator and it’ll just open up. The first time it happens to you, you’ll be like, that was weird. I didn’t…how did the elevator know that I was walking? And what just occurred was that the sensor has a chip in it that opened up the sliding door at the front thing, and that it knew that someone was coming. And these are…the things are going to be working it out now. And let’s say you vacate your room, the thermostat will just turn the heat down. The things are going to be making decisions and speaking to one another. 5G won’t really have any impact on us from an interface standpoint, unlike most other technologies that have revolutionized society-they were very visible, like the automobile or the smartphone. 5G-it’s all in the background. Everything’s going to look the same, but it’ll be acting different.
Rich Helppie:
We did cover some of the security and privacy matters that are coming up through the evolution of technology. Is there a way we can mess up 5G by messing up trade policy?
Aaron Boesky:
Look, there is a dark path before us. I don’t think we’re headed down that path. The dark path is one where a path of suspicion and a path of paranoia, fear, and these things grip nations and they grip the world. In different decades, in wars, things can get dark and I’m definitely not a hundred percent sure in which way this is going to go with us and China, and other nations that are involved in the greater picture of things. I think that we’ve made a big turn. I can sense it in the macro economics and in the chatter that I think things made the turn, I think the risk moment that things were going to get ugly, like the kind of fears that you’re talking about-privacy fears with Chinese technology. It all starts at the core, which is the relationship at the top. And I think that all of these trade negotiations that have occurred between China and the US. The US-all these re-negotiations, they look on the surface like fights, but in truth, they’re bringing these people together. You have rooms now of the top Chinese leaders, they’re flying to the US and they’re sitting down with the US guys. They didn’t even know each other’s names before this started. Now they know each other. They know their wife’s name, they know, your likes, the kind of coffees this guy likes.
I’ll tell you these fights that have occurred under the Trump administration with these nations, it’s bringing nations closer. Had we gone the way of no talk, no negotiation, we’re just putting up a wall of silence. That would have been the dark road. I think we have turned that corner. The one great thing about the way the US handled themselves during all of this is we didn’t stop and we never shut the door. We persisted in sitting down at tables with North Korea, we’ve tried with China. How many times have these leaders and the other leaders under Trump, and under Xi, how many times have they flown back and forth, had back channel chatter. The amount of dialogue that’s gone on in the last three years, during this entire global trade re-negotiation period, I think has brought things together. And it’s setting up a foundation of future trust, not mistrust. The more we talk, the more that we know what’s going on in each other’s politics, in each other’s systems. The more that we can have faith that we don’t need to be overly concerned about geopolitical privacy matters-if you’re talking about corporate privacy matters, that’s a whole other conversation-and it’s not something, it’s not my area of expertise at all.
Rich Helppie:
Let me shift gears just a little bit then, just a little more granular and if it’s outside of the scope of what you want to chat about, that’s fair as well. For the listeners to the Common Bridge, they hear from the media sources in the United States a lot of rancor, a lot of division, a lot of really awful character attacks, both ways. They’re fed up with the government being polarized to the point where they’re ineffective. So what I’m hearing you say is that the trade policies lead to fair trade, fair competition, that US companies will be getting paid for the goods and services, and that’ll be good for, gosh, if I’m a listener in Marquette, Michigan or Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Aaron Boesky:
I think your guy in Marquette is going to benefit noticeably from this renegotiation.
Rich Helppie:
How is that? People are gonna make a decision at the end of this year, and they’re going to say, has their lives changed much. Have these-all the upset that we’ve experienced-has it gotten us any place that’s better for me? And so one of the questions I asked earlier is, why should the guy in McComb, Michigan, Marquette, Michigan, Cody, Wyoming care about whether or not Bill Gates gets another license fee or not, or what else is in it for those people in terms of this higher fair trade, fair competition?
Aaron Boesky:
Let me tell you what’s in it. You want to know what’s in it, is preserving, preserving. It’s not about was your life made so much better under this guy or this Senator or whoever. It’s about preserving what is already the greatest country, empire, nation, culture, that humanity has ever produced, which is the American culture and the American nation. The innovation that we created changed the world forever. And it’s about preserving what we’ve achieved and preserving this way of life that has changed humanity. No other culture or nation in 10,000 years of known history has done anything remotely close, let alone in a hundred years. Any innovation, everything you’re looking at is done by us. Any manufactured product, the assembly line, Henry Ford created that. The phone, the television…it’s just the whole world around us. It’s all from what we’ve created and it’s important that we preserve that. The guy in Marquette or Cody, I think what he needs to be reminded, don’t take for granted what he has. I don’t care how big his apartment or his home or how difficult his job is. This life that we’re living in from the lower to upper class in America, is the greatest life that anyone could have ever have dreamt of historically. The good old days, those don’t exist. This is the good old days. For people that have experienced specific hardships during this conflict, I would say that the government should absolutely find ways to remedy for them. I don’t know what kind of remedies the Trump administration has been deploying for people that have gotten caught in the crossfire. But this crossfire, it needed to happen in order to preserve our world. You want to preserve your telecom provider, your T-Mobile or whatever, they won’t be around. These services, these companies that we buy and we use every day and we get our gas from that station and our automobile parts from over there-those things won’t exist if we don’t fight to preserve. This tough, rip the band-aid off thing with China, it had to happen at some point and I know that people got caught in the crossfire. I don’t know them personally because I live out here, but people over here have gotten caught in crossfire as well. Do I think it had to happen? Yeah. Do I think it could have been slightly different this way or could the policy been shifted a little bit that way? Sure. But we’re dealing with a lot of moving parts here with these governments, and with these economies. And I think that we all need to be a little bit forgiving, and a little bit appreciative of us living in the greatest bull market of all humanity this hundred years, the greatest hundred years, in human development. If you’ve got a tough rap from this and you’re pissed off at some policy or some politician, my advice-ask for remedy. It’s not about we shouldn’t have done this, it’s more about I got caught in the crossfire, I deserve some compensation here.
So I think that Trump and China are doing that for their people. I know that there’s been…they’re well aware that certain selected groups or regions or industries have really gotten caught up in it, their political argument and, you would probably know better than I do on the state side, what kind of programs are being…supplemental compensations. In China, the way they’re doing it is there, the government is buying from the public, they’re keeping the demand up to try to supplement the pain, on the people. And I know Trump in his own way, in his administration I think are doing some of those things.
Rich Helppie:
Aaron, this has been very educational, very instructive. I think our listeners are going to applaud this. Probably going to have you come back as well. But let me ask you this as we wrap up, what topics about trade or trade policy didn’t we get to today that you’d maybe hope to cover. Something that is really central to the way you’re thinking or peripheral for that matter?
Aaron Boesky:
A couple of things. I think that the most important takeaways on policy are that it’s already been achieved. China has acknowledged that it’s time for a new era on technology and innovation for themselves. And the moment is already behind us. The watershed moment, the realization and I think for policy purposes with other nations like Mexico, or whatever negotiations are going on, I think that the takeaway is what we need to do is not push democracy on people. We need to push free market capitalism and protections, not just intellectual property and patent protections, but courts and rule of law needs to be deployed globally so that the entire world can operate on a fair playing field. I don’t care how you elect your officials, but business needs a fair playing field worldwide. And the more and more that that happens, the more and more everyone’s getting richer and happier. When we’re seeing these bull markets every five years or ten years, maybe the guy in Marquette, there’s a boom and his property went up or this or that. These are all happening. These moments of expansion and development are happening because of what we created, which is a fair playing field and competition and it needs to continue.
Rich Helppie:
Aaron great. This has been the Common Bridge with our guest Aaron Boesky. Very generous with your time calling in from either Hong Kong or Shanghai today. I know that your morning is just getting started over there as we’re taping here in the evening. Aaron, I very much appreciate your coming on and sharing this remarkable story. Can’t wait to get the podcast posted. I believe that’ll be next Tuesday, and, we look forward to hearing what our listeners have to say about it, but thank you so much for being on.
Aaron Boesky:
One hundred percent, Thank you for having me.
