Finance

BEIJING — The U.S. and China had a “productive” first day of talks in Beijing about the fentanyl crisis, Jennifer Daskal, a deputy homeland security advisor, told NBC News’ Janis Mackey Frayer in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

“We’re looking for results and we had a productive step forward,” Daskal said, while acknowledging the risk that China could use its sway over the fentanyl supply chain as a bargaining chip.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is an addictive drug that’s led to tens of thousands of overdose deaths each year in the U.S.

Reducing illicit supplies of the drug, precursors of which are mostly produced in China and Mexico, has become an area in which Washington and Beijing have agreed to cooperate.

It comes amid an otherwise fraught bilateral relationship.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed at their meeting in San Francisco in November to establish a working group on drug control.

In an official readout of Tuesday’s meeting, Wang Xiaohong, director of China’s National Narcotics Control Commission, said he hoped both sides would “inject more positive energy” into the stable development of U.S.-China relations.

Wang is also the Minister of Public Security.

The Biden administration in November removed the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science of China from a blacklist known as the entity list, in effect lifting sanctions on its narcotics lab.

That removal allows China’s National Narcotics Lab to repair or buy new equipment — mostly made in the U.S. — and reduce delays in research, lab director Hua Zhendong told NBC News’ Mackey Frayer.

Greater bilateral cooperation allows the two countries to exchange information about drugs more easily, Hua said.

“Only through the information exchange could we know which substance is now a key problem in the U.S., because it’s only evolving.”

Earlier this month, Yu Haibin, deputy secretary-general of the National Narcotics Control Commission, told NBC News that the “root cause” of the fentanyl crisis lies within the U.S.

“Demand needs to be reduced, as controlling demand will naturally curb supply,” Yu told NBC’s Mackey Frayer.

“I want to emphasize the global nature of drug crimes. These criminals work very closely together. Our law enforcement agencies need to collaborate even more closely than the criminals so there can be a robust response to these crimes,” Yu said.

He is also deputy director general of the Ministry of Public Security’s Narcotics Control Bureau.

Asked about the issue of U.S. fentanyl demand, Daskal said the two delegations spent most of Tuesday discussing “the fact that this is a problem of both demand and supply.”

“We talked about the need … to address the supply of the pill, process and other equipment that are used to manufacture these deadly drugs, and to often hide them and create fake pills that look like they’re other things [that] turned out to be deadly fentanyl,” Daskal said.

LONDON — A former British finance minister on Wednesday joined cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase as a global advisor, beefing up the company’s regulatory bargaining power at a time when it faces severe scrutiny stateside.

Coinbase announced that George Osborne, who served as Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer from 2010 to 2016, will join the company on its global advisory council.

He’ll join the likes of Mark Esper, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Patrick Toomey (R-PA) on the council, which is in place to “advise Coinbase on our global strategy as we grow our reach around the world.”

Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase’s chief policy officer, said the company was “pleased to have George join our council at an exciting time for us in the U.K. and globally.”

“George brings with him a wealth of experience in business, journalism and government. We look forward to relying on his insights and experiences as we grow Coinbase around the world,” Shirzard added.

Osborne will serve in an advisory capacity at Coinbase, helping connect the company with politicians and regulators to help further the cause of forming crypto-friendly regulations.

While chancellor of the exchequer, Osborne launched a slew of austerity policies aimed at reducing the budget deficit, including freezing child benefits, reducing housing benefits, and implementing a two-year pay freeze for public sector workers. He also tried to stimulate business activity by cutting corporation tax.

Osborne was temporarily editor-in-chief at London’s Evening Standard newspaper after completing his tenure as Britain’s finance minister. He is currently a partner at Robey Warshaw LLP, a boutique investment bank.

“There’s a huge amount of exciting innovation in finance right now,” Osborne said. “Blockchains are transforming financial markets and online transactions.”

“Coinbase is at the frontier of these developments. I look forward to working with the team there as they build a new future in financial services,” Osborne continued.

This week’s question: CNBC guests often say six Fed cuts are priced into the 2024 market. How do they know? Is it just their opinion? Do they have some calculation or is this just a pitch to support some bearish investment strategy? – Mike H.

Immediately after the Federal Reserve wraps up its meeting this week, all eyes are likely to gravitate to one small piece of wording that could unlock the future of monetary policy.

In its post-meeting statement, the central bank is expected give an important hint about interest rate moves to come by removing a clause from previous statements that reads: “In determining the extent of any additional policy firming that may be appropriate to return inflation to 2 percent over time,” followed by an outlining of conditions it assesses.

For the past year-plus, the wording has underlined the Fed’s willingness to keep raising interest rates until it reaches its inflation goal. Remove that clause and it opens the door to potential rate cuts ahead; keep it and policymakers will be sending a signal that they’re not sure what’s to come.

The difference will mean a lot to financial markets.

Amending the wording could amount to a “meaningful overhaul” of the Federal Open Market Committee’s post-meeting statement, and its direction, according to Deutsche Bank economists.

“We heard at the December meeting that no official expected to raise rates further as a baseline outcome. And we’ve heard that Fed officials are beginning the discussions around rate cuts,” Matthew Luzzetti, Deutsche Bank’s chief U.S. economist, said in an interview. “So getting rid of that explicit tightening bias is kind of a precondition to more actively thinking about when they might cut rates, and to leaving the door open for a March rate cut.”

While the market has accepted for months that the Fed is likely done raising rates, the most burning question is when it will start cutting. The Fed last hiked in July 2023. Since then, inflation numbers have drifted lower and are, by one measure, less than a percentage point away from the central bank’s 2% 12-month target.

Just a few weeks ago, futures markets were convinced the Fed would start in March, assigning a nearly 90% probability to such a move, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch gauge. Now, there’s considerably more uncertainty as multiple statements from Fed officials point to a more cautious approach about declaring victory over inflation.

Chairman Jerome Powell will have a thin line to walk during his post-meeting news conference.

“They’re going to get a lot of data between the January and March meetings, particularly as it relates to inflation,” Luzzetti said. “How those data come in will be critical to determining the outcomes of future meetings. He’ll leave it open, but will not try to open it any more than what the market already has.”

For this meeting, it will be harder to decipher where the full FOMC is heading as it will not include the quarterly “dot plot” of individual members’ projections.

However, most of the public statements that officials have delivered in recent days point away from a hurry to cut. At the same time, policymakers have expressed concern about over-tightening.

The fed funds rate, currently targeted in a range between 5.25% and 5.5%, is restrictive by historical standards and looks even more so as inflation drops and the “real” rate rises. The inflation rate judged by core personal consumption expenditures prices, a U.S. Department of Commerce measure that the Fed favors, indicates the real funds rate to be around 2.4%. Fed officials figure the long-run real rate to be closer to 0.5%.

“The main thing that they will probably want to do is gain a lot of optionality,” said Bill English, the former head of monetary affairs at the Fed and now a finance professor at the Yale School of Management. “That would mean saying something rather vague at this point [such as] we’re determining the stance of policy that may be appropriate or something like that.”

Post-meeting statements going back to at least late 2022 have used the “in determining the extent of any additional policy firming” phrasing or similar verbiage to indicate the FOMC’s resolve in tightening monetary policy to bring down inflation.

With six- and three-month measures showing inflation actually running at or below the 2% target, such hawkishness could seem unnecessary now.

“In effect, that’s saying that they’re more likely to be raising than cutting,” English said of the clause. “I guess they don’t think that’s really true. So I would think they’d want to be ready to cut rates in March if it seems appropriate when they get there.”

Officials will be weighing the balance of inflation that is declining against economic growth that has held stronger than anticipated. Gross domestic product grew at an annualized pace of 3.3% in the fourth quarter, lower than the previous period but well ahead of where Fed officials figured it would be at this stage.

Traders in the fed funds futures market are pricing in about a 60% chance of a cut happening in March, the first of five or six moves by the end of 2024, assuming quarter-percentage-point increments, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch gauge. FOMC members in their latest projections in December pointed to just three reductions this year.

The Fed hasn’t cut as aggressively as traders expected absent a recession since the 1980s and that “led to excess investor confidence culminating in the 1987 stock market crash,” Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, said in his daily market note Monday evening.

Yet, Goldman Sachs economists said they figure the Fed will “remove the now outdated hiking bias” from the post-meeting statement and set the stage for a cut in March and five total on the year. In a client note, the firm said it also figures the committee could borrow a line from the December meeting minutes indicating it would “be appropriate for policy to remain at a restrictive stance until inflation is clearly moving down sustainably toward the Committee’s objective.”

However, a restrictive stance isn’t the same as holding rates where they are now, and that kind of linguistic move would give the committee wiggle room to cut.

Markets also will be looking for information on when the Fed begins to reverse its balance sheet runoff, a process that has seen the central bank reduce its bond holdings by about $1.2 trillion since mid-2022.

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This is a comparison of Wednesday’s Federal Open Market Committee statement with the one issued after the Fed’s previous policymaking meeting in December.

Text removed from the December statement is in blue with a horizontal line through the middle.

Text appearing for the first time in the new statement is in blue and underlined.

Black text appears in both statements.

LONDON — The Bank of England is widely expected to hold interest rates steady at 5.25% on Thursday, but market observers will be closely watching voting patterns, projections and language for hints about future rate cuts.

The market on Wednesday afternoon was pricing a more than 96% likelihood that the British central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee will leave rates unchanged at their current historically high levels, as recent economic data has been pointing to meaningful progress across the institution’s three indicators of inflation persistence.

The labor market has shown signs of rebalancing, although the overall trajectory remains somewhat uncertain, while wage growth and services inflation have surprised the bank’s November projections substantially to the downside, Goldman Sachs economists noted Sunday.

“We therefore expect a 9-0-0 vote split with no dissents, but the vote split remains difficult to predict given limited recent commentary by MPC members,” Goldman economist Ibrahim Quadri said, suggesting the three dissenting voices for further rate increases at the December meeting will fall into line.

“In the case of dissents, we think a dovish dissent in the form of [Swati] Dhingra voting for a 25bp cut and/or a hawkish dissent in the form of [Catherine] Mann voting for 25bp hike are possible, but we think hawkish dissents are less likely given that there has been a moderation in underlying services inflation since the MPC’s last meeting.”

The services consumer price index annual rate came in at 6.4% in December, a slight increase from the 6.3% of November, but below the 6.9% of September, according to the last data available to the MPC when it made its November projections.

U.K. headline inflation unexpectedly nudged upward to an annual 4% in December on the back of a rise in alcohol and tobacco prices, while the closely watched core CPI figure was unchanged at 5.1%.

Though sluggish, the U.K. economy has also outperformed expectations and thus far staved off a technical recession, though GDP flatlined in the third quarter of 2023 and many economists still see a recession in store.

Updated projections

Quadri says the updated projections of Thursday are likely to show a meaningful upward adjustment to the bank’s growth forecast and a reduction of its near-term inflation forecast, though this could be revised up toward the end of the forecast horizon due to the lower conditioning rate path.

“We expect the MPC to retain its data-dependent approach and reiterate that monetary policy ‘will need to be sufficiently restrictive for sufficiently long’,” Quadri said.

“But we think that the MPC may mitigate its tightening bias and soften its policy language somewhat by no longer stating that ‘further tightening in monetary policy would be required if there were evidence of more persistent inflationary pressures’.”

Goldman sees a first 25 basis point cut in May, followed by further quarter-point increments at every meeting until the bank rate reaches 3% in May 2025.

JPMorgan U.K. economist Allan Monks also expects the MPC will hint at a potential easing of monetary policy around the summer, but does not believe it will come until August.

“The BoE will not shut the door on a potential May cut, but we think it will also not want to encourage expectations for an easing that early,” he said in a research note last week.

“The BoE’s updated narrative is likely to be that clear progress is being made on inflation, but that it is too early to declare victory and therefore caution must be exercised when thinking about when and how quickly policy can be normalised.”

JPMorgan also expects the votes for further rate increases to disappear, leaving the MPC unanimous in its decision to hold rates on Thursday. The bank did not rule out the possibility of Dhingra voting for a 25 basis point cut at this meeting.

“While the MPC’s vote is not formal guidance, there is often a fair degree of weight placed on its change from one meeting to the next,” Monks said.

“If there is one dovish dissent, however, this should not necessarily be viewed as a reliable guide to where the rest of the committee is and hence the likelihood of an earlier cut.”

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve on Wednesday sent a tepid signal that it is done raising interest rates but made it clear that it is not ready to start cutting, with a March move lower increasingly unlikely.

In a substantially changed statement that concluded the central bank’s two-day meeting this week, the Federal Open Market Committee removed language that had indicated a willingness to keep raising interest rates until inflation had been brought under control and was on its way toward the Fed’s 2% inflation goal. 

However, it also said there are no plans yet to cut rates with inflation still running above the central bank’s target. The statement further provided limited guidance that it was done hiking, only outlining factors that will go into “adjustments” to policy.

“The Committee does not expect it will be appropriate to reduce the target range until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent,” the statement said.

During Fed Chair Jerome Powell‘s news conference, he said policymakers are waiting to see additional data to verify that the trends are continuing. He also noted that a March rate cut is unlikely.

“I don’t think it’s likely that the committee will reach a level of confidence by the” March meeting, Powell said.

“We want to see more good data. It’s not that we’re looking for better data, we’re looking for a continuation of the good data we’ve been seeing,” he added.

Markets initially took the news in stride but slid following Powell’s comments casting doubt on a March cut. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surrendered more than 300 points in the session while Treasury yields plunged. Futures pricing also swung, with the market assigning about a 64% chance the Fed would stay put at its March 19-20 meeting, according to CME Group calculations.

While the committee’s statement did condense the factors that policymakers would consider when assessing policy, it did not explicitly rule out more increases. One notable change was removing as a consideration the lagged effects of monetary policy. Officials largely believe it takes at least 12 to 18 months for adjustments to take effect; the Fed last hiked in July 2023 after starting the tightening cycle in March 2022.

“In considering any adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks,” the statement said. That language replaced a bevy of factors including “the cumulative tightening of monetary policy, the lags with which monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation, and economic and financial developments.”

Gone from the statement was a key clause that had referenced “the extent of any additional policy firming” that might come. Some Fed watchers had been looking for language to emphasize that additional rate hikes were unlikely, but the statement left the question at least somewhat open.

Going into the meeting, markets had expected the Fed could begin reducing its benchmark overnight borrowing rate as soon as March, with May also a possible launching point. Immediately after the decision, stocks fell to session lows.

Policymakers, though, have been more circumspect about their intentions, cautioning that they see no need to move quickly as they watch the data unfold. Committee members in December indicated a likelihood of three quarter-percentage point rate cuts this year, less ambitious than the six that futures markets are pricing, according to the CME Group.

More immediately, the committee, for the fourth consecutive time, unanimously voted not to raise the fed funds rate. The key rate is targeted in a range between 5.25%-5.5%, the highest in nearly 23 years.

The Fed has been riding a wave of decelerating inflation, a strong labor market and solid economic growth, giving it both leeway to start easing up on monetary policy and caution about growth that could reaccelerate and drive prices higher again. Along with 11 rate hikes, the Fed also has been allowing its bond holdings to roll off, a process that has shaved more than $1.2 trillion off the central bank balance sheet. The statement indicated that the balance sheet runoff will continue apace.

Separate reports Wednesday indicated that the labor market is softening, but so are wages. Payrolls processing firm ADP reported that private companies added just 107,000 new workers in January, a number that was below market expectations but still indicative of an expanding labor market. Also, the Labor Department reported that the employment cost index, a gauge the Fed watches closely for signals of inflation coming through wages, increased just 0.9% in the fourth quarter, the smallest rise since the second quarter of 2021.

More broadly, inflation as measured through core personal consumption expenditures prices rose 2.9% in December from the prior year, the lowest since March 2021. On a six- and three-month basis, core PCE prices both ran at or below the Fed’s target.

In a separate matter, the Fed also announced it was altering its investment policy both for high-ranking officials and staff. The changes expand the scope of those covered to include anyone with access to “confidential FOMC information” and said some staff might be required to submit brokerage statements or other documents to verify the accuracy of disclosures.

The changes follow controversy over multiple Fed officials trading from private accounts at a time when the central bank was making major changes to policy in the early days of the Covid pandemic.

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DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeffrey Gundlach believes the Federal Reserve poured cold water on hopes for a “Goldilocks” economic scenario benefiting risk assets, and the bond king stuck to his call for a likely recession this year.

“When I hear the word ‘goldilocks,’ I get nervous,” Gundlach said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” “When you hear people saying ‘Goldilocks’ and everybody in the room [is] nodding their head in a north-south direction and says ‘yeah, it’s Goldilocks,’ that means everything is priced to something resembling perfection. … Today, Jay Powell took Goldilocks away,” he said, referring to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Many investors had been betting that the economy wasn’t hurt too badly by the Fed’s series of aggressive rate hikes over the past year, leaving an economic expansion that’s not too hot, or too cold.

But Gundlach believes the market’s faith was blindly optimistic and that Powell’s message on Wednesday crushed the “Goldilocks” theory.

The Fed kept interest rates unchanged at 5.25% to 5.50% on Wednesday, while making it clear that it is not yet ready to ease up on the brakes. Stocks tumbled to session lows as Powell said in a press conference that the central bank would likely not have the level of confidence about inflation to lower rates at its next policy meeting in March.

“For now, we think there will be a stall in the inflation rate coming down,” Gundlach said. “That will probably mean that the market is not going to get the Goldilocks picture that it was euphoric about a couple of weeks ago.”

The stock market started 2024 with a bang with the S&P 500 rising to consecutive record highs. The large-cap equity benchmark shed 1.6% Wednesday alone, halving the 2024 gain to 1.6%.

Gundlach said he still expects to see a recession hitting in 2024. He suggested that investors may want to raise cash to fund buying opportunities when an economic downturn arrives.

“I think you want cash to be able to get into emerging market trade once the economy slows and perhaps goes into recession,” Gundlach said. “Globally, there are certainly many pockets of recession at present. If we go into the United States recession, I think we will see a buying opportunity and you want cash for that.”

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Payments giant Mastercard says it has built its own proprietary generative artificial intelligence model to help thousands of banks in its network detect and root out fraudulent transactions.

The company told CNBC exclusively that its new advanced AI model, Decision Intelligence Pro, will allow banks to better assess suspicious transactions on its network in real-time and determine whether they’re legitimate or not.

Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard’s president of cyber and intelligence business unit, told CNBC that the new AI solution is a proprietary recurrent neural network — a core part of generative AI — from Mastercard built from scratch by the company’s cybersecurity and anti-fraud teams.

“We are using the transformer models which basically help get the power of generative AI,” Bhalla told CNBC in an exclusive interview earlier this week. “It’s all built in house we’ve got all kinds of data from the ecosystem. Because of the very nature of the business we are in, we see all the transaction data which comes to us from the ecosystem.”

In some cases, Mastercard is relying on open source “whenever needed,” but the “majority” of the technology is created in house, Bhalla added.

Mastercard’s proprietary algorithm is trained on data from the roughly 125 billion transactions that go through the company’s card network annually.

The data helps the AI understand relationships between merchants — rather than words, as is the focus with large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini — and predict where fraudulent transactions are taking place, Mastercard said.

Competitor Visa has made investments of its own into AI, including a $100 million venture fund for generative AI startups established by the company in October 2023.

While it’s still early, Mastercard anticipates its algorithm will enable banks to save as much as 20%, by eliminating much of the costs they’d typically devote to assessing illegitimate transactions.

The true potential of Mastercard’s technology, according to Bhalla, is in the ability to identify fraudulent patterns and trends to predict future types of fraud that are not currently known within the payments ecosystem.

“The beauty of Mastercard’s ecosystem is we see data from all our customers globally from these transactions,” he said. “What that does its it helps us actually see fraud and patterns across the ecosystem globally.”

Several companies in the payments and digital banking space have said recently that AI will lead to
major changes in their products. PayPal last week week announced new AI-based products as well as a one-click checkout feature.

WATCH: Mastercard unveils Shopping Muse, an AI-powered personal retail assistant

BEIJING — More U.S. companies are finding it harder to make money in China than before the pandemic, raising concerns that businesses may not stay long.

According to an annual survey released Thursday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, 19% of member companies surveyed in 2023 said their earnings margins, before interest and taxes, were higher in China than they were globally.

That’s up from 12% in 2022, when many businesses were subject to stringent Covid-19 controls in China.

But the figures are well below the 22% to 26% share of U.S. companies that said margins were higher in China than they were globally in prior years from 2017 to 2021.

“It is concerning when our member companies are not profitable,” Michael Hart, AmCham China president, told reporters Thursday. “They will not stay long if they are not profitable.”

“This is a wake-up call for the Chinese government,” he said.

China’s economy grew rapidly over the last few decades to become the second-largest in the world behind the U.S.

But China’s growth has slowed in recent years due to the three-year pandemic, a slump in the massive real estate market and a drop in exports.

The slowdown and corresponding declines in domestic sentiment have prompted calls for Beijing to stimulate the economy further. While authorities have announced a slew of measures to support growth, it’s unclear whether there’s interest in large-scale stimulus as China tries to transition away from reliance on real estate to other industries.

The AmCham China survey found that 49% of members said profit margins in China last year were comparable to those globally, up one percentage point from 2022 and the same as reported in 2019.

One-third of respondents said their China margins were lower than they were globally, a drop from 40% that said so in 2022 but up from 30% in 2019.

Hart noted the improvement in 2023 compared to 2022. “Of course, you don’t come to China to break even, so we’d like to see more of our members profitable,” he said.

There were 343 respondents in a variety of industries who responded to the survey, which was conducted from Oct. 19 to Nov. 10.

For 2023, 39% of members said they expected an increase in China revenue compared to the previous year — an increase from the 32% in 2022.

In particular, nearly half of consumer sector businesses said they anticipated 2023 China revenues to increase from the prior year.

“One of the reasons that companies are very interested in China is R&D” and innovation, Hart said, noting factors such as China’s massive market and leadership in specific industries such as electric cars.

However, U.S. companies generally remain cautious about investing in China, amid slower growth and heightened geopolitical tensions.

Nearly half of the respondents said they either plan to decrease investment in China operations, or do not intend to expand investment in the country, the AmCham survey found.

The majority of U.S. companies surveyed said they intend to keep manufacturing in China, but those who said they are considering relocating such capacity outside the country rose to 12% in the last two years, up from around 8% previously.

Foreign direct investment in China fell by 8% to 1.13 trillion yuan ($160 billion) in 2023, the lowest level in three years, according to Ministry of Commerce data. It did not specify how much the U.S. invested in China.

A separate survey released last week from the German Chamber of Commerce in China found that among 566 respondents, the top reasons not to invest in China — or to decrease investments — were low expectations for market expansion or expectation of slower growth in the country.

More than 80% of respondents said China’s economy faces a downward trajectory, the majority expected it would take one to three years for it to “regain a robust economic development.”

The German Chamber’s survey was conducted from Sept. 5 to Oct. 6. It found that by far, the main reason for respondents to increase investment in China was to remain competitive there.

Chinese authorities have in the last year sought to boost foreign investment in the country. Last week, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao said China and the U.S. are working to create a more predictable environment for businesses.

He said Beijing has acted on a 24-point plan released in August for supporting foreign businesses in the country — and that “more than 60%” of the measures have been implemented or seen progress.

Asked Thursday about those efforts, AmCham China Chair Sean Stein noted the measures incorporate suggestions from foreign business chambers in China, but AmCham would like Beijing “to make more tangible progress.”

“It hasn’t been even across all of the different sectors,” he said, noting some improvements in life sciences and in taxation policies. “Certainly seen an uptick from local governments to attract investment.”

Stein said AmCham was more focused on how China was moving forward on the 24-point plan than any high-level Chinese government meetings.

He also said that increased government visits between the U.S. and China did not reflect a fundamental change but rather a recognition “that it’s in their interest to stabilize the relationship.”

Rising U.S.-China tensions were the top concern for members for a fourth-straight year, the AmCham survey found.

The second largest concern among respondents in the latest survey was inconsistent regulatory interpretation and unclear laws and enforcement.

The latest AmCham China survey found that Beijing’s cybersecurity rules on data protection were generally making operations more difficult for members, especially those in tech as well as research and development.

The Cyberspace Administration of China in October released draft rules that would ease restrictions on data exports, but Stein pointed out “it still hasn’t been implemented.”