Hi, I'm Dan Framak, and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Facebook. Today is Tuesday, August 25th.

Coronavirus outbreaks at colleges are up, American Airlines' headcount is going down, and we're

focused on the next global tech giant. Earlier today, China's ant group filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong and

Shanghai. It could become the largest IPO in history. Bigger than Facebook, bigger than Saudi

Arabia's state-owned oil company, even bigger than Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant that

originally birthed Ant Group as a mobile payments company called

AliPay. Now, Ant does not have much presence in the U.S., particularly after the Trump administration

blocked efforts a couple years ago to buy money transfer company MoneyGram. But in China,

it is the financial technology company, with a huge footprint in everything from payments

to lending, to investing, to wealth management.

It's even got a joint venture in food delivery.

And according to its IPO prospectus, ants' profits are up more than 1,000% between

the first half of 2019 and the first half of 2020, hitting $3.2 billion. This is the sort of company that in the past

would have rushed to list its shares in New York, much like Alibaba did in 2014. But Ant instead

turned its back on the Big Apple. And that matters for two reasons. First, it's a passive-aggressive

escalation of U.S.-China tensions. Two, it's an effort by China to prove that Hong Kong can remain a global financial hub

in spite of a new national security law that undercuts the conditions that help turn Hong Kong

into a global financial hub in the first place.

In short, Ant and its IPO are as important to geopolitics as they are to capital

markets or tech markets, and all three will be paying very close attention as the listing gets

closer. In 15 seconds, we'll go deeper, with Nisha Gopoulon, a Hong Kong-based columnist for

Bloomberg opinion. But first, this. We're joined now by Nisha Gopoulon of Bloomberg Opinion.

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