Conservative Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, running for U.S. Senate in the state of Georgia, blew the lid off his establishment GOP opponent Kelly Loeffler’s China ties in an interview with NATIONAL FILE TV.
Collins was President Donald Trump’s preferred pick to fill Georgia’s vacant U.S. Senate seat but the governor chose Wall Street oligarch Kelly Loeffler, whose husband operates the New York Stock Exchange, instead. Loeffler quickly became embroiled in an insider trading scandal when she was accused of dumping stock after she learned of the Coronavirus threat in a behind-closed-doors briefing for senators early on in the pandemic. Now Doug Collins is running against Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock in the November 3 special election, and the top two vote-getters (if nobody gets above 50 percent) head to a run-off on January 5.
“She is a candidate who will read anything off of a card and tell anybody what they want to hear,” Collins told NATIONAL FILE, referring to Loeffler. “Lately, the Senator decided that China is a bad actor on the world stage…Why does her and her husband still allow ten state-owned companies to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange? I guess it’s real simple: When it’s your pocketbook or policy, Kelly is going to choose her pocketbook every time.”
The Doug Collins for Senate campaign stated the following to NATIONAL FILE:
“Kelly Loeffler and her husband Jeff Sprecher have a long and demonstrated history of aiding and abetting China’s attempts to undermine U.S. global economic dominance. Wielding the power of their worldwide commodities exchange – Intercontinental Exchange – to broker deals with the Chinese Communist Party, placing their own financial gain above the security of the United States. Loeffler and Sprecher have gotten rich helping China infiltrate the global and U.S. economies.
As early as 2010, the Intercontinental Exchange was partnering with China’s Tianjin Climate Exchange, and Sprecher himself admitted that he had made an initial tour to China. Following the trip, Jeff Sprecher said, “it is difficult to get direct access to markets in China, and because the Chinese have been developing their own exchanges and their own financial markets, doing business with them is a matter of finding unique ways to get access.”
But what did Sprecher mean by a “unique” approach to access these Chinese markets? What could he and Kelly offer the Chinese government to help ICE circumvent the totalitarian state’s barriers and gain “direct” access.
According to the transcript of ICE’s Q3 2011 earnings call hosted by Kelly Loeffler, it started with Sprecher and Loeffler touting attractive benchmark contracts that drew interest from Chinese companies in ICE’s markets. Sweetening the pot to attract their investment.
Then in 2012, Loeffler’s husband Jeff Sprecher said that ICE had had multiple meetings at very senior levels with the Singaporean government, adding, “Singapore I mentioned because it had been the non-China area where Chinese companies had come to do OTC business. So it’s important that we get that Singapore community set up for future so that they can further penetrate into mainland China.”
At this time, the Intercontinental Exchange already had a substantial presence in Singapore, so Loeffler and Sprecher seemingly sought to utilize the friendly foreign government as an intermediary between ICE and Chinese Communist Party officials to lay the groundwork for a powerful business relationship between their exchange and China.
Such an arrangement would allow the couple to leverage their existing connections in Singapore and internationally recognized exchange to employ Singapore as a springboard into Communist China – establishing relationships with state-owned Chinese enterprises, including the Bank of China and Sinopec group (SHI-NYSE), China’s largest oil refinery.
Over the next three years, Loeffler and Sprecher exploited their control over U.S. and global markets to unleash the untapped potential of the Chinese economy – enabling Chinese companies to become more involved in the New York Stock Exchange. In fact, in 2018 alone, 18 Chinese companied raised more than $4 billion in proceeds.
What’s more, when ICE was selected to manage the new electronic daily price of gold that would replace the previous standard in 2014, Loeffler and Sprecher announced over the next two years (you guessed it) that three of the four largest state-owned Chinese banks: the Bank of China (June 2015), China Construction Bank Corp (Oct 2015), and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (Apr 2016) would participate. Marking the first time a Chinese bank could directly influence the global price of gold.
It gets worse, in 2015, China was experiencing an existential stock market correction; investors borrowed money against their houses to invest in China’s stock market boom, and that excessive margin trading aggravated the market turmoil. Jeff Sprecher declined to comment at the time, as China was “simply too great a business opportunity for anyone to risk angering China’s leaders as they try to regain control of their markets,” Barron’s reported.
Then in 2018, a high-ranking ICE official who had traveled to Shanghai, reported back that Communist China was officially looking at trading ICE contracts.
Sprecher and Loeffler’s business dealings with China stand in stark contrast to the national security interest of the United States. The U.S. National Defense Strategy specifically identifies China as a “strategic competitor,” and states that China’s “predatory” economic practices are a central part of its global strategic ambitions.
The reality is likely somewhere in between, but regardless, Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher have spent years meticulously positioning themselves to profit off of the global economic expansion of China – to the detriment of the United States.”
The Doug Collins campaign’s statement concludes
