[Washington Post] - Mike Bloomberg was presiding over his inaugural Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore in 2018 when, to the surprise of some in the audience, he gushed about one of China’s top government officials.
...The billionaire, whose core business sells financial information to investors, has led efforts since 2015 to make it easier for U.S. companies to trade in Chinese currency, a move embraced by China’s largest banks. He expanded one of his company’s financial indexes, which could steer $150 billion into China while earning his firm an undisclosed amount in fees.
...the company’s presence in China is invaluable in ways that don’t show up in a balance sheet, enabling Bloomberg to provide economic data that is crucial for many subscribers around the world.
Parag Khanna, founder of the strategic advisory firm FutureMap and author of the book "The Future is Asian," has written that Bloomberg’s company is "effectively the world’s largest private intelligence service," which is particularly notable in the relatively opaque Chinese marketplace.
Subscribers around the world rely on Bloomberg-generated information to help them decide where and how to invest capital ‐ a trove that is vital to China’s efforts to entice investment in the government’s bonds.
To meet that need, Bloomberg’s company in March 2018 announced that it would add 333 Chinese government bonds to its Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Bond Index. That opened the way for tens of billions of dollars to flow from investment funds in the United States and elsewhere to four Chinese institutions that issue bonds, including the Chinese government and the China Development Bank.
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