Chinese quant hedge funds have been venturing into overseas markets for years, but their expansion has accelerated as the sector has become increasingly crowded at home and regulators tighten their supervision of a sector able to profit from market volatility.

"Under the current compliance rules in China, some quant strategies don't work, or cannot deliver the best performance at home," said Shen, who helps Chinese funds build global brands.

"So some quant funds are setting up their second investment centre, in Hong Kong or Singapore, where their strategies may work better, and operate more freely."

Like several other Chinese property developers, Shanghai-based Shimao defaulted on offshore bonds in 2022.

Last month, it laid out detailed plans to restructure its debts.

State-owned China Construction Bank (Asia) now filed the petition in Hong Kong over Shimao's failure to repay loans worth HK$1.58bn ($201.8m; £159.7m).

It is rare for a Chinese bank to take such legal action against one of the country's developers. Similar cases against other property firms were launched by overseas-based creditors.

Shimao said in a stock exchange filing it would "vigorously" oppose the lawsuit.

Well I finished my taxes this year and they are finally accepted. Every year, we look at the market and the issues and decide on what provider to use. So here is a summary of our experience. Happy to hear your experiences too.

Over the years I have used TaxCut/H&R Block, TaxAct, FreeTaxUSA, and now this year OLT. They all have done the job, but they have all had issues too. I left the PC version of TaxCut/H&R Block (often considered the #2 software out there) in 2003 primarily because I wanted to move to the Web and use Linux. It was also a huge cost savings at the time. My last H&R Block return was $61.30, and TaxAct was $17.90 in 2003. We used TaxAct (maybe the #4 tax provider, and #3 provider in the high-end market) for many years, but their price hikes over the years were way beyond simple inflation and sanity. By 2020, our last return cost $134.90. They also had issues with calculating underpayment penalties so we sometimes payed penalties when we did not have to. If they had just followed inflation that $17.90 in today's dollars would be $30.16. So I strongly believe that paying more then $30 regardless of how complex your taxes are is a rippoff. So in 2021 we moved to FreeTaxUSA (FTU) which was $21.98. As far as I know they are the #3 tax provider and the #1 value player. We actually like them quite a lot. The main issue we found was their treatment of MN Exempt income from mutual funds is a bit suspect though it can be worked around. The other issue we had was particular to this year. Turns out that we needed K1 support with certain boxes and codes, and the state part of that which for us is MN KF. FTU just could not do it. So we tried OLT. The cost of OLT was $15.90. What I really appreciate about OLT is support of a wider range of filing situations for a price under $30.00. Also like their lack of games including no price tiers based on your return, and being able to see your whole return before paying. What I am less sure of is thier MN state returns. My experience is that you may have to know what your doing and know to manually enter certain things, and manually override others for MN State returns. I had no particular issues with Federal though. So it seems like OLT is good for more complex returns for people that know what they are doing. Overall I liked OLT because of many added capabilities and I do hopefully know what I am doing.

I'll close with the list of tax providers I personally considered in the order of decreasing market share based on relative web traffic: TurboTax (60%), H&R Block (23%), FreeTaxUSA(7.4%), TaxAct (6.4%), TaxSlayer (2.3%), OLT (0.59%), 1040 dot com (0.48%). I did not seriously consider CashApp Taxes, FileYourTaxes, 1040Now, eFile Express, IRS Free Fillable Forms, or Sprintax for various reasons. I also did not consider TaxHawk or Express1040 or consider them in my web traffic estimates as they are from the same company as FreeTaxUSA which is more well known. I wanted a provider with fairly good support, that had some popularity, had a reasonable reputation, could file taxes of reasonable complexity, was focused on US residents, is web based and can use with Linux and Firefox, and could file my state return. I also wanted a provider for under $30 which left only FreeTaxUSA, OLT, and 1040 dot com on the list.

Anyway, hope someone finds this somewhat interesting or useful. Best to you all.

I have one mutual fund where cash dividends (there were no short gains this year) plus Box 7 (Foreign Tax Paid) is not equal to Box 1a (Ordinary Dividends). I have never seen such a thing before. Talked with the mutual fund company and they say it is correct. They claim in this case it includes and "interest adjustment" as well so that Box 1a = cash dividends and short term gains + foreign taxes + interest adjustment.

What exactly is this interest adjustment. I'd like to know for two reasons. One is an accounting one for my accounting program, and the other is tax and anything I should know about it for tax purposes.

Maybe I am just confused but if it appears as a Ordinary Dividend I would think it would it would either mean I get some value for it be it a pass through tax credit (like Foreign Tax paid), a basis change (like a reinvestment), or maybe something that has accrued (something earned but not yet paid). As it stands, it seems like I am paying tax on something I get no benefit from so it kind of blows my mind.

So I am confused. What is this thing. The fund is T. Rowe Price International Stock.

Thanks.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12949945

An investigation examining hundreds of leaked IRS forms offers a glimpse into the often-hidden challenges the U.S. tax agency faces in tackling the favorite new global investment vehicles of the ultrawealthy. That review and interviews with more than a dozen former tax officials show an agency struggling with not only a shortage of experienced agents, but also with an entire regime of federal rules — some of those created by the IRS itself — that have enabled investors seeking secrecy to run circles around the agency.

Accountants and lawyers who prepare these investors’ tax returns have eagerly exploited weak rules and years of lax enforcement to heap layers of secrecy between their rich clients and the IRS agents attempting to audit them.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12949861

It defaulted on its overseas debt last year and faces a winding-up petition.

In January, rival real estate giant China Evergrande was ordered to liquidate by a Hong Kong court.

Country Garden said "due to the continuous volatility of the industry, the operating environment the Group confronting is becoming increasingly complex", when it announced its earnings report would be delayed.

My current Roth IRA positions are:

• FECGX
• FNILX
• FSPGX
• FSPSX
• FXAIX
• FZILX
• FZROX

The mixed bag approach seems to be doing very well. Do you have any recommendations for other Fidelity low cost index funds?

cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/21933249

Any ideas for alternative US tax forums or discussion boards similar to say Reddit Tax? Ideas?

Wondering if anyone here has used and what their experience has been. They do not appear in the lists of commonly hyped providers most of the time.

Normally I use FreeTaxUSA, but this year after entering most everything I found out it did not handle Estate state pass-through withholding.

So I spent yesterday on OLT entering everything again. They seem to handle more stuff at the cost of more complexity. Anyway got it all in this time. Still waiting for some final source documents but may file with OLT this year.

Anyway, wondering if anyone has done a full prep and filing with them and their experience. Thanks.

For the past ~15 years I have tried for the most part to boycott:

• American Express for being an #ALEC member (which supports #climateDenial and obstructs public healthcare, public education, immigration, gun control, etc), and for participating in the #Wikileaks donation blockade
• Visa for pushing the #warOnCash (member of #betterThanCashAlliance.org and offering huge rewards to merchants who refuse cash), for participating in the #Wikileaks donation blockade, and for blocking Tor users from anonymously opting out of data sharing on their credit cards
• Mastercard for pushing the #warOnCash (member of betterThanCashAlliance.org), for participating in the #Wikileaks donation blockade, and for blocking Tor users from anonymously opting out of data sharing on their credit cards

Discovercard has always been a clear lesser of evils. So Discovercard has earned the majority of my business whenever cash is not possible. But now I hear chatter that #Discovercard might merge with a shitty bank that had an embarrassing data leak by an Amazon contractor: #CapitalOne. I was disappointed when Samual Jackson promoted #CapOne. Capital One supported Trump’s Jan.6 insurrection attempt among other things.

So what’s left? JCB (Japanese) and UnionPay (China). JCB pulled out of the US like 10 years ago. People outside the US can get a #JCB card but then IIRC it uses the Discovercard network in the US and the #AmEx network in Canada.

I already favor cash whenever possible. In other cases it will be hard to choose the lesser of evils between CapOne and Mastercard.

update

Found an insightful article detailing a loophole that the fed gave to Discovercard which is why Capital One intends to buy it.

Despite the looming debt pile, local governments are also under pressure to drive spending on science and technology as Beijing is increasingly shunned by the West.

Provincial governments accounted for at least 60% of the total government expenditure on technology in 2022, the Rhodium Group said in a report in December 2023.

Chinese finance news group Caixin Global reported that China’s local governments made bond interest payments worth $174 billion last year alone. That was a record figure — up by almost 10% from 2022.

An improvement in the financial health of local governments will be challenging this year as well, as the world’s second largest economy continues to struggle in its post-Covid recovery, the property market slump drags on and the state of Chinese developers continues to worsen.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/11486860

A huge problem with China’s economic model over the past two decades has been the fact that it has been a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation beyond what the economy can digest.

The problem is that real estate, especially apartments in China, for more than two decades, appeared to be a guaranteed money maker for owners as well as builders and banks and above all, local government officials. Prices rose annually in the double digits, sometimes by 20%. Millions of middle-class Chinese bought not just one, but two or more apartments, using the second as investment for future retirement.

China’s land is owned by the Communist Party, at the local level. It is leased long-term to construction firms who then borrow to build. For CP local government officials, revenue from local real estate land leasing and their infrastructure projects is their major revenue source.

China's macro leverage ratio, or total outstanding non-financial debt as a share of its nominal GDP, climbed by over $560 billion to reach 287.8 percent last year, more than twice the roughly 120 percent of its economic rival the U.S. The new data would put China ahead of Japan, previously the world's most indebted country, whose sovereign debt accounted for about 220 percent of its GDP by the second quarter of 2023.

[Edit typo.]

China is embarking on its biggest consolidation in the banking industry by merging hundreds of rural lenders into regional behemoths amid growing signs of financial stress.

After engineering mergers of rural cooperatives and rural commercial banks in at least seven provinces since 2022, policymakers pinpointed tackling risks at the $6.7 trillion sector as one of its top priorities for this year. That means another wave of consolidation is on the way across the nation.

China’s banking industry has been weighed down by a litany of troubles over the past years, including a deepening slump in the real estate market and an overall fragile economy. The 2,100 banks in the rural cooperative system saw their bad-loan ratio stand at 3.48% at the end of 2022, more than twice as high as that for the whole sector.

"It’s where risks are the most concentrated among smaller financial institutions, so China is pushing the reform at a faster pace,” said Liu Xiaochun, deputy director of think-tank Shanghai Finance Institute. “And one key solution to resolving the risks is through mergers and reorganizations.”

The stakes are high politically as well. Hundreds of people protested in central Henan province in 2022 after a multi-billion-dollar scam at several local lenders left them clamoring for their savings.

Jason Bedford, who predicted earlier troubles at China’s regional banks that rocked markets in 2019, said the rural cooperatives are “probably the least transparent part of the banking system.” China has disposed of bad debt equivalent to about 13% of its gross domestic product in its last big cleanup of the banking system during 2016 and 2022, he said.

“We’re left with only a toxic tail of significantly smaller institutions,” said Bedford, a former analyst with Bridgewater Associates and UBS Group AG. While the contagion risk across the financial system is seen limited, these lenders can be “very disruptive” within their specific regions should they blow up.

While China’s multi-year crackdown on risks has halved the total number of high-risk lenders to 337 by June, some 96% of them were small rural commercial banks and credit cooperatives as well as village and county banks, according to the central bank.

First created in early 1950s, the cooperatives were in their early days mutually-funded, collectively-owned institutions by farmers in socialist communes. The majority of them had been transformed into rural commercial banks over the years.

While the system plays a crucial role in lending to underdeveloped areas, many had long struggled with weak profits, soured assets and lax governance. The group has also been operating in a more difficult environment since 2019, when China’s push for more loans toward small and medium-sized enterprises triggered a price war with bigger banks.

Lack of oversight and proper governance at these lenders has been a persistent issue. Some rural cooperatives are operated essentially as a “cash machine” for big shareholders, the central bank said in its 2023 financial stability report. Some had also deviated from their policy role of servicing the rural and agricultural areas by extending big loans to other areas to achieve growth.

The latest push to merge lending cooperatives got underway in 2022, when regulators called on transforming 25 provincial-level cooperatives created in the early 2000s into modern financial enterprises to further cut risks.

The government had since authorized seven provinces to consolidate their over 500 smaller lenders either through mergers or a shareholding structure, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While the mergers created bigger financial institutions, they aren’t necessarily stronger because the transactions weren’t always done in a market-oriented approach.

One case is Liaoshen Bank Co., which China created in 2021 to absorb dozen lenders with soured balance sheets. The lender still had a bad loan ratio of 4.67% as of end-2022, according to its filing, compared with 1.85% for city commercial banks on the whole.

“The reform will have to really tackle the problems instead of sweeping them under the rug,” said Liu, who in early years of his career oversaw some rural credit cooperatives for Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. in Zhejiang. “Legacy issues could cripple the operations of newly formed institutions if they’re simply covered up, and in a worse case induce more problems and bigger hazards.”

Conflicts may also arise on internal management level, as all parties brought together, strong or weak, will now have to carve up one big cake, according to Shen Meng, a director at Beijing-based investment bank Chanson & Co.

“You don’t really get a big ship by just bundling ten dinghies,” Shen said. “The fundamental issues are still left unresolved."

China’s benchmark CSI 300 Index plunged to a five-year low early last week. The index has now lost a fifth of its value in the last nine months as investors dumped stocks amid concerns over the country’s economy. Hong Kong’s main share index has also been hit by the rout, with its value down 44pc over the past five years.

Beijing has been battling to reverse the decline through policies such as cutting bank reserves.

The drop followed a 4.4% profit fall in the first 11 months from the same period a year earlier, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Last year's profits decline was chiefly due to sharply lower factory-gate prices, driven by over-capacity in some industries, said economist Nie Wen at Hwabao Trust in Shanghai.

Industrial profits will likely rise by between 5% and 6% this year, as a slight improvement in demand and historic lows in inventories in China, Europe, the United States and Japan will lead to a rebound in industrial prices, Nie said.

A new study published in Nature observed that stronger political connections in private listed real estate firms in China positively correlate with increased levels of excessive debt and heightened debt repayment pressures, culminating in an accumulation of credit risks.

The main reasons for private real estate companies’ excessive debt in order to expand investment are as follows.

First, politically connected enterprises are more likely to obtain financing and increase the book-free cash flow, while the over-investment theory believes that the increase in book-free cash flow means an increase of over-investment probability.

Second, real estate has always been an important growth point of the local government’s economy, “GDP doctrine” before the economic transformation and upgrading often makes local government require its associated real estate enterprises to expand investment more blindly.

Third, the professional knowledge of senior executives transferred from government departments is often lacking, and they are more likely to pursue short-term interests and over-invest. Eventually, excessive liabilities will be formed.