Jay:  Today’s show guest is Chris Balding. Chris is an associate professor at the Fulbright University of Vietnam. Before that he spent nine teaching at the HSBC Business School of Peking University Graduate School in Shenzhen, China. Considered to be one of the leading experts on the Chinese economy and financial markets, he is a Bloomberg View Contributor and advises governments, central banks, and investors around the world on China.

His book Sovereign Wealth Funds: The New Intersection of Money and Power, published by Oxford University Press is considered to be one of the go-to references regarding sovereign wealth funds around the world. Please enjoy my conversation with Chris.

Hi, Chris. How are you doing? We’re very happy to have you on.

Chris:  Thank you very much for having me, Jay.

Jay:  For our audience from all the way around the world — all over the world, for that matter — could you please introduce yourself? Who is Chris Balding, and what do you do for a living?

Chris:  Sure. I’m a professor at the HSBC Business School of Peking University in Shenzhen. I have lived in Shenzhen for about eight years. I, to this day, speak almost no Chinese but luckily I have three kids that speak fluent Chinese, and so they kind of help steer me right. Basically, I’ve spent a lot of my time focusing on the data within the Chinese economy. What I mean by that is China is such a unique place that, a lot of times, I feel it’s more like a crime show where you’re trying to decode and play detective on the data to figure out what’s going on in China rather than just interpreting the data.

Jay:  Well, the good news is that you actually made me feel better because I don’t speak any Chinese either. I’m actually Korean-America, and so I’ve been living in Hong Kong for 12 years, so that’s pretty useless of me. But the hopeful thing is that even though you don’t speak Chinese, you’re based in Shenzhen, and you are still able to decipher exactly what’s going on up there. So maybe you could just talk to us about why you moved to China to begin with.

Chris:  Honestly, I’d love to say that there was some brilliance on my part or some master plan a part of this, but there really wasn’t. Really, what prompted us to move to China the first time, my wife was an architect, and she got headhunted to go to China for a while. And then when I was graduating with a PhD — my background is international finance and economics, and I didn’t want to move to middle America to do my research on international finance and economics — and I was no China specialist when I moved to China, but I had a sense of adventure, and I was willing to go. Eight years later, I’m still there. They haven’t kicked me out yet.

My kids are learning Chinese. It’s a stimulating place to be, and you wake up every day and see things you’ve never seen before and learn something new every day.

Jay:  You’re in Shenzhen, and I think it’s literally you’re in the front-row seat of some of the greatest innovation that is happening in the entire world right now. I just spoke to a couple of hardware guys that are based up there, and it just sounds so incredible. Every time I go up there — I don’t go up there often enough, but I should. But every time I go up there, it seems like things are moving faster, and the scene is just exploding. So I imagine over the last eight years, you’ve just seen it explode.

Chris:  Just in the past probably two years, right around where I live, they’re putting in — I’ll be honest in saying I’d have to go out and count — it would probably be 20 to 30 high rises that are 30-plus stories. Several of them are 50 and 75 stories. So the degree of change and investment that you’re seeing not just in the hardware side but in the tech-development scene is just amazing.

A couple of years ago, I remember the first time I saw mobile payments on a phone, and I remember, “What the heck is that?” thinking to myself. I’d never seen it before. And now, two years later, nobody uses anything else. And that’s just the speed of change that you’re seeing in China.

Jay:  I think that’s one of the biggest shocks for anyone that goes to visit China, is that literally no one carries a wallet anymore. Everything is done on WeeChat, WeePay, Tencent, and it’s just mind-blowing. I think it’s one of the first things where China has actually surpassed the West with the technology and the integration into everyday life.

Let’s begin. I’m actually quite excited about talking to you because I’ve been dying to hear your views, being on the ground. Why don’t we start off with initially sort of what are some basic misconceptions or asymmetrical information that people have when they think about China and the economy of China? I’m thinking about this from an investor’s standpoint. We have a lot of investors that never lived over here, have never been in the region, or maybe they’ve come on trips. How would you paint the picture to someone that has never been here?

Chris:  One of the things that I would say from a big-picture standpoint — I’ll start off with a couple of big-picture points… If you think back to your intro-level stats class, one of the first things that they teach you in stats class is about the normal distribution. And so many things in China are very abnormal distributions, whether it’s bimodal extremes where you have distributions at the extremes and very little in the middle, other things like that. That manifests itself in many different ways.

I think another thing that’s very important to note is Chinese consumers are very, very price sensitive — extremely price sensitive, probably more so than any other country I’ve seen.

The other thing is that Chinese consumer preferences remain very, very fluid. The concept of brand loyalty on any product in China is almost unheard of. And so this creates a very unique environment where a retailer, a company, whatever it is, they can do something very novel, innovative, it’s a good product, and at the same time, consumers have no problem switching in a very rapid format.

Jay:  That’s interesting.

Chris:  One of the things that all of this creates, I think, from investments themes going forward is there is, generally speaking, I would say that there is confidence within China about future investment returns. But I would also say that those are relatively fragilely held. Those aren’t deeply held convictions. Those are beliefs about the future, about how investments are going to perform.

However, people are incredibly willing to change their minds about the state of investment returns. So whether it’s a new investment product, whether it’s a new company — whatever it is — people don’t hold those convictions profoundly. They’re willing to change between companies and asset classes very, very easily. This impacts how companies behave because they know that they have a one-to-two-year window. And if they’re not performing in that one-to-two-year window, consumers and investors are going to move on to something else.

Jay:  Interesting. I also heard an argument recently stating that the Chinese consumer behavior has actually shifted towards locally curated products and brands as opposed to imported products. Is that what you’re seeing as well?

Chris:  I think the picture there is complicated. There are definitely cases where that would be true. There is also cases where I think that would be untrue. Let me give you a couple of examples.

I think if… Let’s assume that price was no object. I think there would be a near universal preference among Chinese consumers, for instance, on something like infant formula. There’s a perception of higher quality, higher safety — things like that. At the same time, in our little scenario, let’s include price as a factor. Chinese companies have realized — and this is how I think corporate culture is changing in China — Chinese companies have realized that there are factors beyond price that matters. And part of this is a natural evolution because five to ten years ago, they used to be able to go out in the marketplace and say, we will beat any competitor by 10% on price. And that’s all that matters. And consumers accepted that for a long time.

China is no longer a low-cost place to do business, and so Chinese companies are saying, we have to compete on other factors, whether it’s quality, whether it’s branding, whatever it is. And so consequently, there are a lot of Chinese companies that are saying, “Hey, we may not be able to compete on price or quality, but we’re going to give you a B+ product at 20% less price than a New Zealand infant formula that is going to charge, let’s say, 25, 40% more.”

So it’s more complicated, I think, than just saying there’s been a shift away from foreign goods. And in many cases, especially luxury products, automobiles, thing like that, I think there’s still somewhat of a preference. But those low and mid-tier companies in China that compete in some of those spaces are definitely upping the quality of their game and are providing, in a lot of ways, solid products for significantly less than what imported brands do. So there’s more competition in those spaces for sure.

Jay:  Interesting. I think for an outsider, someone that’s not on the ground there and doing research and seeing things day to day, one of the large misconceptions perhaps is that either everything is fine in China, and all the data is accurate, and China doesn’t have any problems or issues, but then there’s also this other side of people looking in, hearing these stories about ghost town cities, like all these buildings that are empty and “China is a currency manipulator,” and “All the macro data coming out of China is false, and it’s just made up by the government,” and “Everything is censored by the government as well — all the news.” So where on that entire spectrum is reality?

Chris:  I think on this specific issue, one of the things that I would always say is people coming to China… I meet people and they’ll say, “Everything is overstated.”

And I would say, “No, not everything is overstated.”

And they say, “Are you saying it’s understated?”

No, I’m not saying it’s understated. There are cases where Chinese firms or provinces have overstated data, and there’s cases where they’ve understated data.

I’ll give you a story from a couple years ago. The Chinese, one of the national audit offices was auditing SOEs on their financial data. And they released a report that said that a lot of Chinese SOEs were fudging their financial data — revenue or profits and some of them were overstating revenue or profits.

Basically, on the surface, what happens is that you see this story of these businesses that wanted to keep profits to themselves. And so they basically understated their profits so they could plead poverty to the government so they wouldn’t have to turn over some of that money.

Other SOEs didn’t do that great, and so they tried to artificially boost their revenue and profits to show how good they had done.

And so one of the things that I would always caution people… In a lot of places, as the United States for example, there are people that will complain about inflation data and the United States GDP data. When we’re talking about arguments in the United States over corporate data or national GDP data, things like that, when we’re arguing over inflation data, we’re arguing over pretty technical stuff that are going to move inflation data numbers by a tenth of a percentage point, two-tenths of a point, generally speaking. And if someone tweets it out, if the government tweets it out, I can generally take it as accurate.

In China, I would always, always urge people to do their own research and to go back and double check the numbers. Go to the source data of where people are saying they got data. It might be right. It may be overstated. It might be understated. But I would say that you cannot just take it as a given.

All this is to say unfortunately it’s complicated.

To give you one more example… There’s a lot of skepticism, as I think there rightfully should be, about the national GDP data, which is one number that draws a lot of scrutiny. Within about [inaudible 0:15:55] have been declared

by the national government, I think there’s evidence that even national GDP data is not entirely accurate.

One of the things that I think has also happened is that the national government has smoothed data so that when real GDP is below expectation, they kind of boost it upwards and that when it’s above expectation, they kind of nudge it down so that it’s a very, very stable line.

So as an investor, one of the things that I would always tell investors, it’s a good place to start if you’re going to use a research service or something like that, but it is absolutely incumbent to say, this is the investment that I’m looking at. This is the trade I’m looking at — whatever it is — and go out and you have to do the legwork for yourself. You have to match the data, because it’s simply too unreliable to just assume the data is overstated or understated.

Jay:  That’s good advice. It’s very tricky, like you say. It’s kind of agonizing, I think, for a lot of investors that are sitting outside of China, because they see this growth happening, and they see this explosion of innovation. The writing is on the wall that China is going to be the largest economy in the world, but they’ve either gotten burned so many times trying to trade the market or make direct investment into China without having the right partner or just having bad luck that they are scared. And they’re scared to go in. But at some point, I think just from a big-picture standpoint, I think it makes sense that you have to get involved somehow.

If China is going to be the largest economy in the world, the Chinese indices are going to have to be added to all the major indexes of the world as well. And so at some point, there’s going to be a lot of fund flow going in. So from that perspective, it seems like, long term, that’s the direction. But you have to be able to withstand the ups and downs from here to there. So that’s always challenging, especially when if you are someone that’s trading, like we were just talking about, off of GDP data, and you’re used to this 7, 8, 9% growth that we’ve seen in the past but all of a sudden that is being compromised as well, these all have to be taken into account. So the world has to change their expectations.

High 6% GDP is still quite amazing in most parts of the world, but I think that the appetite of the world with regards to China how gotten a little bit too big.

Let’s talk a little bit about the banking sector in China. You do a lot of good writing on Bloomberg, which I enjoy reading, Bloomberg View. I find your pieces very insightful. I think the entire world is probably asking this same questions: Is China really facing a banking crisis right now?

Chris:  I would… That’s a question that is very complicated and has a lot of people worried. And you can get people that are very strident on either side. My personal leaning, for lack of a better term, is I definitely lean somewhat more pessimistic. But I think a banking crisis is foreseeable — is not foreseeable in the near future, let’s say within the next one to two years or something like that.

With that said, I think one of the things that I think has happened in a lot of investors’ psychology is that they think of crises as mechanistic type of events, that once we hit a debt to GDP ratio or something like that, there’s going to be a crisis.

One of the shows that I watch from time to time is there’s this show on National Geographic called Airplane Disasters or something like that. Basically it covers a plane crash and what went wrong. And one of the things that is so interesting to me when you watch a show like this is airplanes don’t crash because one thing goes wrong. It’s normally a series of events that come together, and it’s a one in a hundred times a one in a hundred times a one in a hundred, and they all converge on a single point and the plane crashes.

Too many people think of a financial crisis as a mechanistic event where one we hit X% of debt to GDP, we will have a financial crisis.

But I think a lot of history shows that that’s simply not how financial crises and other events like this work, that what you have is you have risks building up, and you have risks converging at a certain point. And all of a sudden, we have some type of major event. It’s not a mechanistic way of thinking about it.

And the reason I say all that is this. China has experienced incredibly rapid debt growth. It has an incredibly high debt level. The risks are continuing to increase. I think that we need to make that very clear, that the risks are continuing to increase. China cannot continue its level of debt growth for another five or ten years. If China continues growing its debt levels at these rates in absolute or in relative terms, in five to ten years, absolutely, there will be a crisis of enormous magnitude.

But right now, it’s more like think of it this way. China right now is maybe the person that has some form of early-stage cancer, that if it was caught early could be operated on, addressed, and we could solve the problems. It’s like heart disease. If they started exercising — things like that — the problems would go away.

These risks continue to build, make no mistake about it. And I think most importantly, China does not show any… I’ll give them a little bit of credit. In 2017, I think they’ve at least paid more attention to these issues, but debt continues to grow quite rapidly. But I think the biggest concern is that they’ve been talking about this for five years, and they still aren’t really addressing it, and the pain that it’s going to entail, like a dieter that is going to stop eating cookies, they’re still not willing to do that.

Jay:  Right. Now, has the shadow banking sector been reeled in? Is that under control now? Or are they just sort of doing the thing that they did before where if they shut down one channel, they find another channel to continue to grow that debt?

Chris:  I think what is most likely happening, I think what is the most likely scenario is exactly what you described. They’re shutting down one channel, and it simply pops up some other place. I’ve seen some reports that China, through July, has already blown through about 80% of its annual loan quota, because a lot of that means that what is happening is that they’re bringing a lot of that debt that was in shadow-banking products onto the formal bank balance sheet. So they’re increasing those loan quotes.

So I think what is very likely happening is that they’re simply shutting down one avenue and it popping up one other place. When I said earlier that China is going to have to face the pain of this, what I mean by that is all of this debt that they’ve put out there, a lot of it has gone into financial assets, not as much productive activity. This is why apartment values in Shenzhen are above $1000 a square foot.

The average annual wage in Shenzhen is $10,000 a year, and apartment values are $1000 a square foot. So you can figure out from there what that means.

They’re going to have to accept lower real economic activity and lower asset prices. But until they’re willing to make that tradeoff, they’re going to have to continue to pump very high levels of debt.

Jay:  Yeah, I guess the situation just gets grimmer. And then on the other side of this China conundrum, if you will, is the currency. I think a lot of investors have scratched their heads trying to figure out exactly what is going on with the renminbi. There’s a lot of mainstream media calling China a currency manipulator, however, at the same time, we see last October, the IMF included the renminbi in the SDR basket. And so in theory, I would think that that is a long term positive for the currency itself.

What are your views on the currency? There’s obviously a lot of capital controls still in place. There’s a lot of capital outflows or attempted outflows from the country. So what is your take on the currency there?

Chris:  I think fundamentally — and this is the issue that China, again, hasn’t addressed fully, is that fundamentally at this point, because asset prices are so high in China on things like real estate, which is the primary wealth factor for households, one of the things that you have is you have a lot of people that are very interested in essentially increasing the amount of foreign assets that they would like to hold, whether it’s people that have purchased a couple of apartments in China and they want to take some of that money off the table and they want to send their child to college in Australia or the US or wherever else, whether it’s buy a beach home in Thailand, whatever it is. You have much higher appetite for foreign assets by Chinese investors than you do by foreign investors for Chinese assets.

Now if that were to carry forward going forth, that basically means that there’s going to be large amounts of capital outflows out of China. So the issue of capital controls is essentially just trying to put a Band-Aid over something much, much larger.

I don’t think China will return to the level, in relative terms, to the level of foreign investment into China that it saw previously. And I don’t think that’s an issue that they’ve grappled. So if you have a higher appetite for foreign assets by Chinese investors, that means that money is going to flow out of China. That means that there’s going to be a depreciation in the RMB, and capital controls can only prop up the RMB for some time.

Now again, this doesn’t mean that there’s a currency crisis in the offing or anything like that. But if you believe that Chinese investors want to purchase more beach homes in Thailand or send more kids to school in Australia and the US than vice versa, that means that the RMB is going to depreciate, and capital controls can only prop it up so long.

Jay:  Yeah, and while they’re doing that, in due process, they are angering a lot of potential real estate buyers across the world. I have friends that have been trying to buy a home in Vancouver, where they’re from, for the last five years, and they just haven’t been able to pull the trigger because it’s just one straight line up.

So it’s certainly interesting times, Chris, and it’s great that you’re on the ground right there watching it all.

The one thing I want to ask you is then from a slightly longer-term picture — let’s say five, ten years — it seems like China, despite its growing pains is still going to be okay. You have some guys, short-sellers like Jim Chanos who’s been short on China for I don’t know how long. I don’t know if he’s still short, but he hasn’t made any money on that short China trade.

You have the one-off guys like Carson Block that fundamentally pick out companies that are fraudulent, but even that, a lot of times that blows up in their face because a conglomerate or the SOE or the government comes and bails the company out, and so they don’t make any money trying to short China.

I can’t see a situation where China will completely collapse. It might go through some growing pains and a slower assent. What are your views in, say, five, ten years from now?

Chris:  I think that’s a very good assessment of, for instance, like the short selling that is going on out there. I do think there are absolutely… For instance, if you’re targeting short selling as an umbrella, I do think absolutely that there are significant short sell opportunities. What I mean by that, one of the things that you see if you look at — I’ll be honest, I haven’t done this for a month or two, so it might be a little outdated — but a couple months ago, I created a spreadsheet of all A-share companies. And what you saw was a very large number of companies that had very high PEs. And you had a relatively small number of companies that had, let’s say, PEs under 20. What you saw was that companies that had PEs under 20, they were all the SOE oil companies, SOE banks, etc. So my market cap, all those companies that had PEs of five, ten, fifteen, they were the major companies. They were the anchors of the entire index.

If you remember when I referred earlier to the bimodal distributions…and then you had an astounding number of companies in China that has PEs up above 100.

So when you’re talking about, for instance, like short selling is the universe, one of the things that I would tell people to think about is, especially companies that are cross-listed in Hong Kong and things like that, there are a lot of companies that I would put in that, into at least looking at, are these good short sell opportunities based upon their valuations, their business models, different things like that.

Turning to the Carson Block options, the short sellers of the world, that has become an increasingly riskly trade for the exact reason that you’ve mentioned. People are not as surprised. SOEs step in to bail the stock price floor underneath it, things like that. There’s absolutely those types of risks.

And then there’s a other people that are trying to short China, similar to the RMB is going to have a currency crisis or something like that. Within the foreseeable future — one to two years — it’s very, very difficult to see. That would have to be considered a low probability event.

As I said earlier, if China’s debt continues to grow at the rate it’s growing, it’s not crazy to think that by 2022, 2025 — something like that — if their debt continues to grow at this level that they will have a currency crisis, because life like that person that doesn’t exercise and they continue putting on weight and eating too much and not exercising, they increase the risks of having a heart attack. But within a short trading horizon — let’s say less than a year — I think it’s a low probability event that anything like the RMB or a major Chinese bank is going to explode.

Jay:  Got it. Thanks for sharing those views. Taking a, say, five-year-ish out view, what, if anything, excites you about China from maybe a structural growth perspective or just exciting themes that you’re witnessing on the ground there that might be appealing to an outside investor?

Chris:  I think the things that I would tell people to focus on is a lot of the — for lack of a better term — small, medium-sized type of companies that have little to do with the state. And let me give you an example of what I mean by that.

Alibaba and JD — and these are two well-known companies — I’m just going to use them as an example of the type of thing to look at, not as necessarily as investment opportunities. One of the things people forget when we talk about Alibaba is one of the reasons Alibaba has become so ubiquitous as a consumer channel in China is because so much of the country in China is 30-story high rises, and so a delivery guy can take his little ATV, and he can load it up with packages. And these days, he can either start with a roll-on and he just starts at the 30th floor and makes his way down and delivers a whole bunch of packages in ten minutes in one building. Or he does into the lobby of the building, and now they have these locker structures so that he just put goods into a bunch of different lockers.

And so one of the things that has happened because of this is Alibaba, the overall consumption story in China is not weak but it’s not strong either. But the reason Alibaba is growing is because it provides a lot more choice to consumers at much better prices. And so consequently, that’s giving smaller companies channels to put their products out to consumers much faster, much quicker, and have brands be discovered that would not have been discovered through offline retail channels.

So one of the things is, when you talk about this, there’s a lot of small, medium-size brands that are being able to make their name much quicker than they would otherwise.

The other thing that I would say — and again, as an example, and this is how, when I say consumer preferences are changing — JD.com is taking a very different approach to online retailing than Alibaba, and they’re taking the approach where Alibaba went asset light. JD is trying to focus on service, name brands, other things like that. And so one of the things, as an example, more than a specific investment opportunity, Chinese consumers, as their incomes continue to increase, they are much more interested in what is the quality like, what is the service like — all of these additional types of things. And you’re seeing companies really start to target those ideas as selling points.

Just to give you one specific example, one of the first times I went to a Burger King in China, when you go to a Burger King in the US and in many other parts of the world, their slogan is “You can have it your way.” So if you want extra tomatoes or something like that, you can get extra tomatoes. In China, I asked for it, and they looked at me like I was crazy because nobody asks for their preference. This was a couple of years ago.

That is changing so that people will go to brands and say, “This is what I want. This is how I want it done.” And so there’s a lot of brands that are targeting that increased affluence and saying, “How is it that I want it done? What are the service add-ons that I want that are really making a much bigger difference?” as Chinese consumers demand much higher quality.

Jay:  That’s very interesting. I guess it’s a benefit and a perk of being on the ground there and having spent the last eight years there. You get to see all these things changing in real time.

Chris, thanks so much for sharing your insights on China. I found it fascinating, and I think the audience is going to be really interested and learn a lot from what you had to say.

I just want to switch gears really quickly before we look to wrap up. I know you wrote a book not too long ago called Sovereign Wealth Funds, and we obviously don’t have enough time today to discuss the full extent of it, but maybe you could give us a few of the talking points of what you discussed in your book.

Chris:  Sure. The basic idea with sovereign wealth funds now are a very large investment class. You have the China Investment Corporation. You have the Norwegian Pension Fund, and it basically was covering what are these funds investing in, how are they investing, what are the rules that they have around how money comes into the fund, how money goes out of the fund…

Focusing on Asia specifically, what are unique about Asian sovereign wealth funds is virtually every sovereign wealth fund outside of China and Singapore are natural resource funds. What I mean by that is Norway and Saudi Arabia is probably the two best examples, Abu Dhabi. They basically are just funds that they…

So when Abu Dhabi pulls oil out of the ground, there’s essentially no net wealth change. What I mean by that is there’s oil in the ground valued at, say, $50 a barrel, and if they pull it out, they actually incur a transaction cost to pull that oil out of the ground, but now they have a financial asset instead of a commodity. So there’s been no net change.

In China and Singapore, they actually accrue their sovereign wealth funds by running surpluses of different kinds. And so that has been a very different change. But what is notable about the China sovereign wealth fund, for instance, is that they actually are a pretty conservative investor. And the other thing that is very notable about the China Investment Corporation is that they actually structured it much more like a leveraged hedge fund, for lack of a better term, where they were actually borrowing money from the PBOC to give them the capital, and they’ve actually covered their cost of capital plus a few basis points — maybe 25 basis points — over their life span. So they’re actually doing reasonably well investing in pretty safe, primarily USD-denominated assets.

Jay:  Got it. I think it’s fascinating hearing about these funds. China has — which I’m sure you’re fully aware of is — they call it, the national team fund that comes in every once in a while. It seems like a before a big public holiday or something, they’ll just come in and buy a bunch of the bank shares or just cause a nice rally in the market. I find it’s very funny. It’s fascinating to watch, and to see people try to trade around it is even more comical. But I guess it’s just another nuance of the Chinese markets.

Chris:  There’s actual trading strategy where Chinese investors will, essentially, they say, trade the government. And basically, if there’s suspicions that the government is buying something, that people will just buy the same thing and ride it out for a couple of days or a while because they believe that the government is essentially setting a price floor on that particular stock.

Jay:  Yeah. And will such a large percentage of the market being retail, it tends to work, I guess.

Chris:  Yes, absolutely.

Jay:  Chris, it’s been such a pleasure. Thanks so much for, again, coming on and sparing the time to share your insights about China. Is there anything in particular you’re working on that you’re excited about that you want to share? Are you working on another book maybe about China?

Chris:  I’ve kind of got three things in the docket. In no particular order, one of them is I’ve started working on a book about the Chinese tech sector and how society is going to be changing over the next five to ten years.

Jay:  Excellent.

Chris:  That’s the first one. The second one is that I’m working on a little bit of a social media startup that hopefully should launch hopefully the first of the year. That’s the second one.

And then the third one — it’s not final yet, but there’s a very good chance that I’m going to be essentially launching a joint venture fund where I’m partnering with somebody else, targeting the Chinese market.

Jay:  That’s fantastic. That’s great to hear. We will definitely be following you thereafter, and we’ll definitely be in touch afterwards.

What’s the best place that our audience can find you, follow you, connect with you? I know you tweet as well.

Chris:  Yes, I tweet at Balding’s World. It’s @BaldingsWorld. And then they can emails me anytime at the university. My email address is on the university website. Just google me, and you can look me up that way.

Jay:  Great. We’ll have all the links linked up in the show notes. Great, thanks, Chris. Thanks for your time, and we appreciate the insights, and best of luck on the ventures.

Chris:  Thank you so much, Jay. Appreciate it.

Jay:  Alright. Take care.

Chris:  Take care.