StanChart CEO Says Biden More Likely to Engage With China
Standard Chartered Plc CEO Bill Winters said a new U.S. administration led by Joe Biden would be more likely to engage with China.
(Bloomberg) -- Standard Chartered Plc Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters said a new U.S. administration led by Joe Biden would be more likely to engage with China to defuse some of the tensions that have been building over the past four years.
If Biden becomes president there would also be more “consistency” in the U.S. approach to China, Winters said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s David Ingles.
“I’m an optimist, my hope would be that with an element of engagement that China and the U.S. would begin to act on which they both recognize to be the underlying case, which is that the world and each country is better of cooperating rather than purely competing,” he said. “But we don’t think the competition will completely go away either.”
Biden on Thursday strengthened his hold on the race for the White House, chipping away at President Donald Trump’s early lead in crucial swing states. Tensions between China and the U.S. have been building over the past four years, with both nations embroiled in a trade dispute and imposing tit-for-tat sanctions.
But Winters cautioned that tensions will likely remain, and that China also “doesn’t see a big difference with a Biden win.”
He struck an optimistic note on loan impairments, saying that early indications now show that loan delinquencies taken in the early stages of the pandemic have come down, which is “encouraging.”
The lender beat estimates in the third quarter, posting a 40% drop in adjusted pretax profit to $745 million. Earnings were boosted by a fall in impairments, which dropped for the second quarter in a row.
“Where we took a cautious stance on where the future losses could be, the early data points that are coming suggest that it was in fact cautious, but it’s early days,” Winters said.
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