PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release
March 27, 2025

CONTACT:
Dede Laugesen
info@PresentDangerChina.org

C.P.D.C. Leaders Call on SEC Chairman-designate to Support President Trump’s America First Investment Policy and Wall Street Mavens to Abandon China First One

WASHINGTON, D.C.— On February 21, 2025, President Trump unveiled his “America First Investment Policy” (AFIP) – an important and long-overdue corrective to decades of Wall Street sluicing trillions of dollars of securities purchases to companies owned and/or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Some CCP enterprises thus generously funded are directly tied to the People’s Liberation Army. And one, a giant electric battery manufacturer called Contemporary Amperex Technologies Ltd. (CATL), has not only been officially listed by the Defense Department as a “Chinese military company operating in the United States.” It has also been formally charged with exploiting slave labor by the Chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, John Moolenaar, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green and the former Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, now Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC) has argued from its founding in March 2019 against such underwriting of the greatest existential threat ever to have faced our country. It applauds President Trump for working to end that insanity which was greatly enabled by a May 2013 Memorandum of Understanding agreed between the Security and Exchange Commission’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission.

This MoU was negotiated under the direction of then-Vice President Joe Biden and granted Chinese companies privileged access to our capital markets. Unlike every American and other foreign corporation listed there, their counterparts domiciled in Communist China are not required to conform to U.S. securities laws and regulations.

While Mr. Trump has tasked his entire administration with implementation of the America First Investment Policy, the SEC will play a key role in its enforcement.

As it happens, the man nominated by the President to serve as the SEC’s next chairman, former Commissioner Paul Atkins, will have his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee today. Consequently, the CPDC’s Chairman Brian Kennedy and Vice Chairman Frank Gaffney yesterday wrote Mr. Atkins in the interest of establishing his responses to three critical and most timely questions:

1. Do you support and, if confirmed, will you work to enforce President Trump’s America First Investment Policy?
2. Will you, consequently, oppose American investment banks from helping Chinese companies determined to be engaged in “military-civil fusion,” human rights abuses or otherwise U.S.-sanctioned from raising funds or being traded in our capital markets?
3. Will you rescind the May 2013 Memorandum of Understanding, ending the dangerous “China First” investment policy that has done so much to metastasize the Chinese Communist Party’s threat to our national security, economic competitiveness and people?

They encouraged the Banking Committee’s members to clarify these points before acting on the Atkins nomination, as well.

Messrs. Kennedy and Gaffney separately addressed yesterday the leaders of four American investment banks that have not only long promoted U.S. investments in China without regard for their dire impact on our country’s national and economic security interests. Currently, Jamie Dimon’s J.P. Morgan Chase, Brian Moynihan’s Bank of America, Ted Pick’s Morgan Stanley and David Solomon’s Goldman Sachs are actively seeking to raise at least $7.7 billion and possibly much more for CATL in a Chinese gambit out of Hong Kong clearly intended to defy and subvert President Trump’s AFIP initiative.

The CPDC’s leaders concluded their letter to Messrs. Dimon, Moynihan, Pick and Solomon with the following warning and call to action:

…You are on notice: The efforts you are making to raise funds for our mortal enemy via its leading electric battery manufacturer are inimical to the national security of the United States and at odds with the stated policy of the President aimed at safeguarding our country and people. They also appear to fail properly to disclose to investors material financial risks.

We urge you to withdraw at once from underwriting the CATL Hong Kong IPO lest your companies suffer, at a minimum, serious reputational risk and possible criminal exposure.

The CATL fundraiser should also be the subject of close scrutiny and decisive opposition from not only the Senate Banking Committee, but Rep. Moolenaar’s Select Committee on the CCP, Rep. Green’s Homeland Security Committee, Rep. French Hill’s House Financial Services Committee and indeed the full House and Senate, as well.

The Committee on the Present Danger: China also urges the American people to learn more and take action as well by writing the President, their elected congressional representatives and the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in support of the America First Investment Policy and in opposition to efforts like the CATL IPO to perpetuate the China First one.

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CONTACTS:  Dede Laugesen, info@PresentDangerChina.org_______
Read More at Committee on the Present Danger: China