A complete retreat would follow Vanguard’s surprise move two years ago to scrap plans for a mutual-fund management license in China to focus on the BangNiTou tie-up with Ant that was launched in 2020.
Fidelity and Neuberger Berman Group have recently joined BlackRock in launching onshore funds through new wholly-owned units, while Manulife Financial Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley have gained approvals to buy out local partners to gain full control of existing ventures.
The race for fund advisory is heating up with more players coming in, hurting profitability. Vanguard’s venture, which has been offering only products from competitors, booked a loss in 2021 that was much higher than an internal forecast made after it was set up in 2019, Bloomberg reported last year. Vanguard owns 49% of it.

Banking is a confidence trick. You put money in the bank today because you are confident you can take it out tomorrow; to you, a dollar that you have deposited in the bank is just as good — just as much money — as a dollar bill in your wallet. If you show up at the ATM at any time of day or night, you expect it to give you your dollars.
But the bank doesn’t just put your dollars in a box and wait for you to take them out; the bank uses its depositors’ money to make loans or buy bonds, and just keeps a little bit around for people who need cash. If everyone asked for their money back tomorrow, the bank wouldn’t have it.
But everyone is confident that, if they ask for their money back tomorrow, the bank will have it. So they mostly don’t ask for it, so when they do, the bank does have it. The widespread belief that banks have the money is what makes it true.
This is obvious stuff. Also obvious, and famous, is that it is an unstable equilibrium. If people stop believing it, it stops being true. If everyone stops believing in a bank, they will all rush to get their money out, and the bank won’t have it, and their lack of belief will be retrospectively justified. Whereas if they had kept believing, their belief would also have been justified.
Isn’t this ridiculous? But there is a deep social purpose to the confidence trick. Banking is a way for people collectively to make long-term, risky bets without noticing them, a way to pool risks so that everyone is safer and better-off.
You and I put our money in the bank because it is “money in the bank,” it is very safe, and we can use it tomorrow to pay rent or buy a sandwich. And then the bank goes around making 30-year fixed-rate mortgage loans: Homeowners could never borrow money from me for 30 years, because I might need the money for a sandwich tomorrow, but they can borrow from us collectively because the bank has diversified that liquidity risk among lots of depositors.
Or the bank makes small-business loans to businesses that might go bankrupt: Those businesses could never borrow from me, because I need the money and don’t want to take the risk of losing it, but they can borrow from us collectively because the bank has diversified that credit risk among lots of depositors and also lots of borrowers.
But the basic problem remains: the confidence trick, where trust in banks makes them trustworthy and distrust in banks makes them fail.
Bankers and bank regulators tend not to talk in these terms... because talking about it ruins the magic. But they know it in their bones; at a deep level they understand that preserving that confidence is their most important job.
More specifically they know that if there is a run on a bank, and that bank goes bust and doesn’t pay depositors, then there will be a run on other banks. And they know that the run can start with a bank that is bad, that is undercapitalized and made poor decisions and in some sense deserves to fail, but that it can spread to other banks that are good.
And they know that “good” and “bad” are not really the things that matter: What makes a bank good is not just its capital ratios and liquidity position but also confidence, and however good the ratios it is hard for a bank to survive a loss of confidence. They know that they are all interconnected, that they are players in an essentially social game, and that the goal of the game is not to win but to keep playing.

I like to sleep well at night. 10 years in bucket #1 is the best sleeping aid.

@crash. Thank you for your concern. I was sore and the airbag cut my hand but no great harm. We liked the car so much that we bought the same car,,, three years newer. Big out of pocket. It was a CPO car but I figured out it had never been inspected. Had it checked out and it had low compression. The dealer took the car back. The next day it was back on the lot as a CPO car. Buyer beware.

How many years later, and 'Morningstar' + 'not working' is still a thing? Asking as a longtime former M* user.

UBS Group AG agreed to take over its longtime rival Credit Suisse Group AG for more than $3 billion, pushed into the biggest banking deal in years by regulators eager to halt a dangerous decline in confidence in the global banking system. The deal between the twin pillars of Swiss finance is the first megamerger of systemically important global banks since the 2008 financial crisis when institutions across the banking landscape were carved up and matched with rivals, often at the behest of regulators.
The Swiss government said it would provide more than $9 billion to backstop some losses that UBS may incur by taking over Credit Suisse. The Swiss National Bank also provided more than $100 billion of liquidity to UBS to help facilitate the deal.
Swiss authorities were under pressure to make the deal happen before Asian markets opened for the week. The urgency on the part of regulators was prompted by an increasingly dire outlook at Credit Suisse, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. The bank faced as much as $10 billion in customer outflows a day last week, this person said.
The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month prompted investors globally to scour for weak spots in the financial system. Credit Suisse was already first on many lists of troubled institutions, weakened by years of self-inflicted scandals and trading losses. Swiss officials, along with regulators in the U.S., U.K. and European Union, who all oversee parts of the bank, feared it would become insolvent this week if not dealt with, and they were concerned crumbling confidence could spread to other banks.
An end to Credit Suisse’s nearly 167-year run marks one of the most significant moments in the banking world since the last financial crisis. It also represents a new global dimension of damage from a banking storm started with the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month.
Unlike Silicon Valley Bank, whose business was concentrated in a single geographic area and industry, Credit Suisse is a global player despite recent efforts to reduce its sprawl and curb riskier activities such as lending to hedge funds.
Credit Suisse had a half-trillion-dollar balance sheet and around 50,000 employees at the end of 2022, including more than 16,000 in Switzerland.
UBS has around 74,000 employees globally. It has a balance sheet roughly twice as large, at $1.1 trillion in total assets. After swallowing Credit Suisse, UBS’s balance sheet will rival Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG in asset size.