For D1 Capital, the primary risk in China isn't economic but political. The government's ability to arbitrarily influence resource allocation, punish successful companies, and eliminate entire sectors without due process creates an unacceptable level of uncertainty for capital allocators, regardless of how cheap valuations become.

Beyond its moral importance, freedom of the press serves a critical financial function: third-party data verification. In autocratic nations without it, investors cannot independently validate corporate or government data, making fundamental analysis unreliable and susceptible to hidden risks as countries can simply stop publishing unfavorable metrics.

Official surveys like PMI or household data can be flawed, delayed, or politically influenced. Daily Treasury tax collections provide a real-time, unbiased measure of nominal growth and economic activity, as it reflects actual cash income being earned and is difficult to manipulate.

Despite review from governments and AI labs, the International AI Safety Report's writers were independent contractors for Yoshua Bengio's Mila research institute. This structure ensured they were not obligated to incorporate feedback from powerful stakeholders, preserving the document's scientific integrity.

Beyond screening countries for freedom, the Freedom 100 EM Index also excludes all state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at the security level. This double-layered approach reinforces its core philosophy of avoiding government interference in markets, applying the principle from top-down allocation to bottom-up stock selection.

Private firms like ADP have business incentives that may conflict with the public's need for consistent economic data. ADP's recent decision to stop providing weekly data to the Fed during a government shutdown highlights this tension and the irreplaceability of official government statistics.

To maintain independence and trust, their public benchmarks are free and cannot be influenced by payments. The company generates revenue by selling detailed reports and insight subscriptions to enterprises, and by conducting private, custom benchmarking for AI companies, separating their public good from their commercial offerings.

The government's failure to release key economic reports (jobs, GDP, inflation) creates a dangerous information vacuum, forcing the Fed and businesses to operate without instruments. This void presents a significant business opportunity for private companies to develop and sell alternative economic data streams and forecasting models to fill the gap.

An investment framework cannot simply isolate economic freedoms while ignoring civil and political rights. All three are deeply interconnected. Using the analogy of a car, a country cannot function properly for business if a key component, like civil rights (the steering wheel) or economic rights (the transmission), is missing.