Chinese Bank is now the largest in terms of market capitalization

By China Watcher

For the many anti-China bashers, so-called experts, economists and critics who predicted that China’s economy will collapse way back in 1995 due to its infrastructural bottlenecks and the poor management inefficiency because of its perceived lack of human rights and freedom of speech, the results showed otherwise.

Some sincere and truthful economist (devoid of a hidden agenda) predicted that the Chinese economy is going to recover first from the economic slum. From the recent market developments in Asia, it was the expectation of a Chinese second stimulus package which has generated renewed and strong interest in the markets from Japan to Indonesia. Most Asian markets were up yesterday.

The surprising news that comes from Bloomberg (a media supporting Western type human rights blatantly) indicated that the Industrial Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is now the largest bank in the world in terms of market capitalization. Among the Top 10, China has 3 banks on the list.

The following is a table of the world's biggest banks by market capitalization in current U.S. dollar terms, showing their rank at the end of January 2008, 2007 and 2003.


1/31/08 Mkt cap (US$bln)
1 ICBC 277.514
2 Bank of America 195.933
3 HSBC Holdings 176.788
4 China Construction 165.234
5 Bank of China 165.087
6 JPMorgan Chase 159.615
7 Citigroup 140.698
8 Wells Fargo 112.365
9 Banco Santander 109.862
10 Mitsubishi UFJ Financial 105.412
11 ABN Amro+ 103.643
12 UniCredit 97.591
13 Intesa SanPaolo 89.954
14 BNP Paribas 88.487
15 Goldman Sachs 87.602
16 UBS 84.878
17 BBVA 78.302
18 Sberbank 77.713
19 Royal Bank of Scotland 76.023
20 Wachovia 75.401

So what does the anti-China critics have to say?