Get Xi Jinping on the phone - "Quick, send more munnies!"

The Sunday Times - driven, we think, by some of the economic nationalists - is worrying about Chinese state investment in Britain. We’d suggest that we here in Britain are on the correct end of one of the great bargains in all history here - if we judge by the figures the Sunday Times uses that is. So rather than worrying about this the correct action would seem to be to call up and ask for some more.

The claim is, firstly:

The updated list, published today, puts the UK assets held by the Chinese state at £45 billion and the total held overall by Chinese and Hong Kong investors at £152 billion.

£45 billion for the state is a big number. Except, well, it isn’t. UK household wealth - which is what we all own in aggregate - is around the £15 trillion mark. Roughly and aroundandabout half of that is financial assets, the vast majority of which is inside pensions. So the Chinese state owns perhaps 0.6% of Britain’s financial assets.

Ooooh, scary! Or, of course, close to a rounding error.

But the S Times goes on to tell us something even more scary too:

Taking account of dividends paid out by Shell, BP and other stock market-listed firms, it easily takes the payments back to the Chinese state above £1 billion over the past five years.

So, £200 million a year then. On a £45 billion investment pot. A 0.44% yield. The 30 gilts yield is around 4% at present. So, roughly and aroundandabout, it seems that we can borrow from the Chinese state at one tenth of the rate that our own government can borrow from the markets in general.

Now yes, that ignores any capital appreciation and looks only at yields. It’s also not true that companies listed in London necessarily have much to do with the UK economy and even, well, UK financial assets do not belong to us, the nation, but to whichever individuals happen to own them.

But think like those economic nationalists are asking us to do. China has perhaps 0.6% of us and we’ve got to pay one tenth of the rate that we charge our own government. We get their money at an absolutely bargain price that is.

The claim is then made that of course we’ve got to stop this economic rapine by dastardly foreigners. The correct reaction is to ‘phone up Xi Jinping and shout “Quick! Send more munnies!”