Ant Group’s massive initial public offering (IPO) was stopped cold in its tracks earlier this week. Ant Group, a fintech company backed by Alibaba and its co-founder Jack Ma, was supposed to list its shares in the stock exchanges of Shanghai and Hong Kong last week. The IPO was slated to raise a mammoth sum of at least US$34 billion for the company. What happened instead was the Shanghai Stock Exchange suspending Ant Group’s listing on Tuesday, followed shortly by the same action from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Ostensibly, Ant Group’s IPO process was stopped after Jack Ma gave a speech during a financial conference in Shanghai in late October. In his comments, Ma had essentially labelled the Chinese financial system and regulations as antiquated. This presumably angered the Chinese government because Ma was quickly summoned for a meeting with the country’s financial regulators. And then came the news of the fintech firm’s stalled IPO....