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Samson:  China’s plan for $1.5 trillion Belt and Road empire left in tatters by coronavirus pandemic

24th May 2020

China is now “facing its own worst nightmare” as its $1.5 trillion plan to exert influence around the world has been blow apart by the coronavirus

China is being forced to decide whether it wants to maintain its global influence or feed its own people as the coronavirus throws a major spanner in the works of its $1.5 trillion plan to exert influence around the world.

As part of its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative to win friends and influence people, China has dished out hundreds of millions of dollars to over 126 countries in recent years in the form of cheap infrastructure loans.

The idea was to connect countries across continents on trade by creating a 6000km sea route connecting China to South East Asia, Oceania and North Africa, an element known as the “Road”. It also wanted to create a “Belt” by building railway and road infrastructure to connect China with Central and West Asia, the Middle East and Europe. However, the economies in many of these nations have collapsed under the strain of the global coronavirus pandemic.

China is understood to have invested $1.5 trillion dollars in the program. And, while the leaders of those countries are increasingly worried about how they’re going to pay back their Belt and Road loans, China is suffering its own economic downturn.

Professor Jane Golley an economist and director of the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) said this all means the superpower has been left “facing its own worst nightmare”. She told news.com.au China now has to balance providing financial relief for the suffering nations that signed up to the loans, and the needs of its own people — as its economy shrinks for the first time since the Mao era.

Ultimately she believes there will be a far more urgent need for China to spend the money fixing its own domestic issues leading to a significant slowdown in its ambitious global planning. “As the friend-set for China diminishes, particularly with the rising tensions with the West, they’ve got a bigger incentive to back their own friends, but they’ve got the added incentive to stimulate domestic growth because they’re under such serious pressure,” she said.

“They’ll be under so much pressure that I think stimulating the domestic economy will ultimately become more important for them.” Not only that, she says there are rumblings about China sending hundreds of millions of dollars abroad at a time when the nation’s people, many of them living in developing world conditions, are scraping by in the midst of an economic crisis.

The Kiel Institute, a German research group, has valued China’s lending to the developing world at more than $520 billion in recent years, meaning it has become a bigger lender than the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. “Imagine you’re living in the hills in rural China, where you don’t have electricity or a proper road into town,” she said. “You’d want to see the money spent there instead.”

China is also facing pressure over the Belt and Road on an international stage as the nations that signed up are asking for some form of relief on their debt repayments.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been accused of employing a “debt-trap strategy” by countries like the US and India who say the Belt and Road Initiative is saddling poorer countries with debts they will not be able to pay off. About half of the nations which have signed up are considered high-risk debtors.

Now the economies in those nations have gone belly up because of the global coronavirus pandemic, it is certain they won’t be able to pay off the debts they owe any time soon. What’s more, many of them are so poor they had to put up their ports and mines as collateral to secure funding.

According to a report in the New York Times, Djibouti - a small country on the horn of Africa - has debts to China which jumped to more than 80 per cent of its annual economic output. Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s debt to China totals 20 per cent of its annual output. In Kyrgyzstan, the amount is about 40 per cent. However, Professor Golley said the idea that China poured money into nations that they knew would collapse makes “zero economic sense” and there’s no evidence that’s the case.

Now she says China is “facing its own worst nightmare” as it watches economies failing in the nations it invested in so heavily in, while it suffers its own downturn. “I mean, what do they do? They’ve got their own economy crumbling and people in need of desperate need of financial support, but if they don’t come to the rescue of all the other countries they lose all that money as well,” she said. “So they’re going to have to strike a balance.” Aside from the money involved, one of the key goals of the Belt and Road was for China to gain allies across the world — a strategy to make friends and influence nations as it were. But now, in a COVID-19-affected world, it is seeing its reputation take a pummeling.

Western nations in particular are openly questioning its role in the coronavirus outbreak, after Chinese officials downplayed the severity and contagiousness of the disease at the beginning of the year. The country also bowed to international pressure this week and said it would back a review into the source of the virus pandemic, but only once it’s “under control”. In other words, China not only stands to lose money it invested globally but the trust and influence it wanted to gain through the Belt and Road Initiative in the first place.   LINK

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Courtesy of Dinar Guru:  https://www.dinarguru.com/

Frank26   ...in Iraq their currency is now going to play fairly because they added value IMO and they stopped using the auctions and they stopped using the American Dollar...Trump said lessen your dependence on our American dollar and they did...Iran was siphoning all the money we were sending to them through the Iraqi auctions and it was supplying terrorism...they're [Iraq] getting the last parts of the monetary reform done.  Trump and the Fab 4 said that that's enough time wasted.  Move on it.  Do it...at any moment it could happen suddenly...it's an accounting process.  It's all about the numbers. 

Pimpy   Everything has been pointing toward the month of June. We don't know why.  But my thing is this - The bi-weekly budget, the fact that Pompeo, the United Nations and the IMF are gonna be there in June.  It doesn't mean anything I'm just saying it seems to me like it does...look, I don't know what's going on but I can't help but feel whatever is coming it's happening in June.  There's a lot of things pointing out to June.  There's a lot of crap happening in May but there's definitely, definitely a lot of things happening in June.  They started drilling in these fields on the outskirts [of Iraq] where it's reported to have 10x the amount of oil that's already being reported in Iraq. 10 times that amount.  All I keep hearing is rate change.  Rate change.  Rate change...

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Trump: "I Have A Chance To Break The Deep State"

by Tyler Durden   Sat, 05/23/2020 - 16:10

In an exclusive interview set to air Sunday, President Trump tells Sharyl Attkisson that he believes he is making inroads in draining the Washington swamp.

"If it keeps going the way it's going, I have a chance to break the deep state. It's a vicious group of people."

- President Trump on "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson"

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-i-have-chance-break-deep-state

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Iraqi Dinar News 05/24/20

Pimpy’s Investment Chat: 

https://youtu.be/o_myn6zEWSE?t=3