Biden, Modi and G20 allies unveil rail and shipping project linking India to Middle East and Europe

[BlueWavePsych]

12. Bravo! A better alternative to China's Belt and Rail Inititive.

The Real Problem with the Belt and Road Initiative Isn’t Strategic

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was supposed to be a masterstroke of geopolitics. China financed and built infrastructure projects in the developing world, buying third-world countries’ loyalty while enriching itself. It made a total of about $1 trillion in loans for infrastructure in poor countries in the past ten years.

Now, while the country’s domestic economy faces its own slate of crises, the BRI is also in trouble. It doesn’t appear to have purchased the geopolitical loyalty that China had hoped. And it’s losing a bunch of money, too.

The technical financial term to describe a lot of these loans is “really stupid.”

China makes these problems worse by not being transparent about its loans (which is also a problem with its local-government finances). “According to a 2021 study in the Journal of International Economics, approximately half of China’s loans to the developing world are ‘hidden,’ meaning that they are not included in official debt statistics,” Bennon and Fukuyama write. That means it’s impossible to accurately assess credit risk before a crisis happens. Then, when the crisis comes and the hidden debts are revealed, there’s no trust in the restructuring process.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-real-problem-with-the-belt-and-road-initiative-isnt-strategic/