Student loans are Chinese apartment blocks are Jiang Jianqing’s private jet.
Jiang Jianqing is the boss at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), which bought a few private jets a while back — with your money. As the invaluable Timothy Carney explains, this was another in the Export-Import Bank’s long line of shenanigans. ICBC, the largest bank in the world, set up a leasing company to buy the jets from Hawker Beechcraft, which was at the time owned by Goldman Sachs. The Export-Import Bank offered sweetheart financing to make the deal happen. As Carney summarized: “The U.S. taxpayer was lending money to the largest bank in the world (owned by the Chinese government) to buy corporate jets from Goldman Sachs.”
That is a sentence that makes me feel like I need a shower.
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