Alibaba founder Jack Ma has blasted international financial regulations and said China needs to chart its own path, days before Ant Group launches the world’s biggest initial public offering.
“The Basel Accords are like an old people’s club . . . we can’t use yesterday’s methods to regulate the future,” Mr Ma said at a conference in Shanghai on the weekend, referring to the international banking supervision framework.
Mr Ma said the challenges that the rules were designed to resolve were not relevant to China’s phase of development. “Many of the world’s problems” stemmed from “only talking about risk control, not talking about development, not thinking about young people’s or developing countries’ opportunities”, he said.