002: George Calhoun on the strange disappearance of Alibaba's Jack Ma

Today my guest is George Calhoun. George is the Executive Director of the Hanlon Financial Systems Research Centre at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey where he focuses on Quantitative Finance programs. He is now also the co-Principal for a recently awarded planning grant from the National Science Foundation to create an Industry/University Research Centre focused on FinTech.

George is also the author of several books, and writes frequently for Forbes magazine on finance, with a particular interest in China.

That's where today's conversation takes us. George gives us the inside track on the strange and curious disappearance of Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma since he made THAT speech last October 27th.

In this episode, we cover:
- What has happened to Jack Ma and why has the world's largest ever IPO (The Ant Group) been cancelled?
- The various sightings of Jack from rural China to the golf course to Alibaba HQ
- The paradox of the Chinese government's behaviour
- What the future holds for Jack: prison, retirement, a comeback?
- The strange global media silence

We conclude with exciting FinTech news from George's university, the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, which has just been awarded a major grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to create a new national research centre on Fintech.

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• Podcast music: Tamsin Waley-Cohen's Mendelssohn's violin concerto