Taking Stock: Politicians, billionaires and China’s shifting consumers

**Rahul Tandon** (0:03)
I'm Rahul Tandon, welcome to Business Daily, and I'm taking stock once again this week. And with me, we have Han Lin, China Country Director at the Asia Group, speaking to us from Shanghai, the country's commercial capital, and Allison Schrager, who is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, joining us from New York City. And I want to get both of your thoughts on this.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Not easy to have to be in a city like New York, but that is exactly what this pair was able to accomplish.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:35)
Two people have climbed to the very top of the Empire State Building.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:40)
That is 1,554 feet above the ground today. And they didn't just kind of hang out when they got there. They flew a banner.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:48)
And there was also a marriage proposal?

**Rahul Tandon** (0:51)
Now, I'm going to ask you both a personal question. I don't know if you're both married, but a proposal like that, do you have work for either of you?

**Allison Schrager** (0:59)
Well, not for me, but I think it just shows that these two people belong together.
I mean, good relationships are about common interests. They clearly share that interest most people don't have. So, you know, I'm rooting for them.

**Han Lin** (1:11)
I have two daughters, and I imagine one of these days they'll be married, but they're fascinated by it. I just hope it doesn't raise their expectations so much because I certainly can't afford such a wedding.

**Rahul Tandon** (1:22)
There we go. Those two going up the Empire State Building in New York, of course. They did get themselves into a little bit of trouble. I'm not going to tell you how I proposed to my wife, but if you ever meet her, please don't ask her. She's not very happy about the way that it went. Not as romantic as she imagined.
So this week has been a really important week because we got to know a lot about President Trump's finances. He made $1 billion from cryptocurrency in his first year as president, and he made 21,285 share trades during 2025 His disclosure ran to 927 pages. Here's a question for both of you. President Biden's disclosure in 2024 Do you want to hazard a guess as to how many pages that was?

**Han Lin** (2:12)
Ten.

**Rahul Tandon** (2:13)
What about you, Allison?

**Allison Schrager** (2:15)
I'm going to go with 27

**Rahul Tandon** (2:16)
27 It was 11 pages.
So, quite a difference there. Before we hear from President Trump, what were your thoughts on what we learned about the president? You know, he's disclosed everything. That's a good thing, isn't it? Yeah.

**Allison Schrager** (2:33)
I mean, I guess it was disappointing, but also not surprising. I think corruption has been part of this administration, at least financially.

**Rahul Tandon** (2:41)
Well, they would deny that and say there's no evidence of that at all.

**Allison Schrager** (2:45)
Well, I mean, technically that's probably true.
For years, he went along with the idea that crypto was a fraud and his administration has been very friendly to it. At the very least, it's unseemly. I'm definitely of the school that while you're in office, you should probably just be in like plain old index funds and just to avoid any sort of conflict. But again, this isn't exactly shocking news. So if anything, maybe it will start a conversation, not just for him, but honestly, for all politicians. There's also a lot of issues with a lot of members of Congress also actively trading on information they know. I'm not saying Trump did that, but there's also a lot of evidence of that in Congress of maybe saying when you are serving the country that you should be invested in just plain old index funds where you have no direct stake in any company.

**Rahul Tandon** (3:35)
Okay. And let's go to what happens in China. I presume President Xi doesn't make a similar sort of disclosure, does he?

**Han Lin** (3:42)
You know, absolutely not.
But it is interesting because I read in the Washington Times a few weeks ago that there is an active study expected to be completed by the US intelligence community on the assets of China's top 25 leaders, both directly or indirectly held through their network of family members. And one of the questions that comes up is why now? OK, and some people attribute it to maybe the volatility of U.S.-China relations. But I will tell you that in the current anti-corruption campaign, where the net is spread wider and deeper than ever before, Trump's type of transparency, if only everybody else did it in China, the government thinks it would make things much easier.