China Commerce Minister: Market Access For Foreign Investors To Widen

Amid the back-and-forth of a global trade war, illustrated perhaps most keenly between China and the United States, China will seek to boost market access, which the country’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan said Monday via published comments. The minister’s remarks were carried in the state-run People’s Daily.

Reuters noted Zhong stated that globalization of economics, that is remains irreversible, and China, as the newswire reported, “will continue to defend the global multilateral trading system.”

The remarks come as China, late last week, formalized a series of initiatives aimed at relaxing restrictions on foreign investments on a series of industries, as far-flung as banking and agriculture. Global Times reported that the initiatives are examples of China “moving to fulfill its promise for greater market access.”  That comes against the backdrop of China boosting its goods and services access in the last few years. Zhong’s missive stated that “the country’s market access for foreign capital continues to ease, and efforts for the protection of intellectual property rights continue to strengthen.” Illustrative of that trend, said the minister, is the fact that accumulated imports were $20 trillion of goods and $3.7 trillion in services.

By way of background, and as noted in this space late last year, in some overtures germane to the financial markets, Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said foreign stakes in financial companies can increase upon the official lifting of caps, eyeing eventual elimination. Those movements are geared to letting foreign investors take significant stakes in (and perhaps even control) asset management firms and insurance firms upon reaching a threshold of at least 51 percent.

Even as China is making moves for access, the U.S. has been reshaping its own policies. As reported last week, the White House has said it will not block companies with at least 25 percent Chinese ownership from buying some tech firms here. In tandem with that approach, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has said the U.S. can block firms from forming joint ventures overseas, depending on the technology at stake. Those policies are less restrictive than some observers had anticipated.

More recently, the latest salvos from China offered up a “negative list” that National Development and Reform Commission has said is subject to limits on such investments. And the list, per Global Times, has been winnowed to 48 from 63. Free trade zone industries, the government has said in recent days, include telecom, mining and agriculture.


Tether Co-Founder Reeve Collins Backs New Stablecoin Project

Tether Co-Founder Reeve Collins is reportedly backing a new stablecoin project called Pi Protocol that will be backed by yield-bearing real-world assets like bonds.

The new stablecoin is expected to debut on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains in the second half of the year, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Feb. 18).

Pi aims to let industry participants who market the stablecoin get most of the profits from it, according to the report.

The company will use smart contracts to mint its USP stablecoin and will reward the minters with another token, USI, as yield, the report said.

“We view Pi Protocol as the evolution of stablecoins,” Collins told Bloomberg. “Tether has been extremely successful in showcasing demand for stablecoins. But they keep all the yield. We believe 10 years later the market is really ready to evolve.”

Collins served as Tether’s first CEO from 2013 to 2015, when he and his partners sold the company to the operators of the crypto exchange Bitfinex, according to the report.

Tether said in January that it made $13 billion in profits in 2024, Bloomberg reported Jan. 31, adding that the stablecoin issuer files quarterly information as part of a third-party attestation by accounting firm BDO rather than issuing audited financial statements.

In addition, Tether said it issued more than $23 billion in USDT in the last three months of 2024, and had more than $7 billion in excess reserves.

It was reported in January that an executive order issued by President Donald Trump will boost stablecoins and issuers like Tether and Circle Internet Financial.

Trump’s order aligned stablecoin’s with the government’s efforts to maintain the global supremacy of the dollar and blocked a potential competitor to stablecoins by barring development of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

On Monday (Feb. 17), Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong (SCBHK), Animoca Brands and HKT said they agreed to form a joint venture to issue a stablecoin backed by the Hong Kong dollar.

Cedar Money said Jan. 30 that it raised $9.9 million in a seed round to support the growth of its payments software that uses stablecoins to facilitate cross-border payments between developed and emerging markets.