At 8.30am last Thursday, from his office in New York, Stephen Schwarzman, the global chief executive of $684bn private equity giant Blackstone, logged into a video call with Fang Xinghai, the chair of Beijing’s top financial regulator.
The timing of the “China-US Financial Roundtable”, an annual meeting between a handful of Wall Street veterans cherry-picked to speak with a small group of top Chinese officials, was awkward.
Not only was the world obsessing over the looming risk of default at property developer Evergrande, but less than a week earlier, Blackstone’s biggest ever bet on the Chinese real estate market — part of the engine of its Asia growth plans — had been thwarted by regulators in Beijing with no warning.
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