narration to find the correct road to walk along so we depend on ourselves and you through books and reading i hope we can change the next generation to planted flowers not so honest that we find on the path we travel along we have to read more widely to forge a new future if you want people here definitely seem keen to read. it will that is the hope at least that iraq's literary heritage is being rekindled by a new generation who say their country's future stability and growth will be helped by young iraqis reading and writing more chance trafford al-jazeera backed out. i'm sam is a that time to have a look at those top stories the u.n. mission in central african republic has told al-jazeera conditions are stable enough to ensure a free and fair election on sunday violence has flared and 3 u.n.

peacekeepers have been killed the constitutional court is set to decide on whether to perspire on the vote situation in bank this morning where. distribution of the voter cards on go on and people. who are registered are coming in large numbers to kurds the population is determined in this country. and we are determined. to ensure that. japan and france have confirmed their 1st cases of a mutation of corona virus that's more contagious the new strain 1st identified in britain scientists say it's 70 percent more transmissible more than 50 countries are banning travelers from the u.k. . france is among a number of european union countries receiving its 1st shipments of corona virus

vaccines vaccinations start on sunday beginning with people in elderly care homes it's part of a wave of deliveries being made after the blocks drug agency approved the pfizer biotech shop the city of nashville is under a curfew after a motor home exploded injuring 3 people recorded bomb warning was played beforehand it's not yet known who was responsible afghanistan's capital has been hit by a series of explosions 5 separate attacks were reported across kabul 2 police officers were killed in the worst incident no group has claimed responsibility it comes as the taliban and afghan government prepare to resume talks here in doha at least 35 people have been kidnapped in northeast nigeria armed men dressed in military uniforms set up a road block an abducted the travellers as they headed to made to go to the armed group of harm is suspected to be responsible it's counting the cost. the american

people have finally spoken out here as i see it because of our. more dangerous world is looking. with the election behind us the republican party dumptruck the. us politics and is now at the bottom of. sammy's a than this is counting the cost on al jazeera your weekly look at the world of business and economics this week predatory lender and hidden debts china loans more money to the world than the richest 32 nations what does the world china and what does beijing get when you don't pay our. was this man really responsible for

a one trillion dollar loss on wall street or was he a convenient scapegoat for taking on big investors. and the story of the world over migrant workers stranded in thailand without jobs and no money for rental food. the world's 20 largest economies agreed to give $76.00 of the poorest a debt repayment holiday but china has yet to publicly offer any support at a time many nations need the extra financial headroom to tackle the coronavirus pandemic beijing has been rapidly rolling out its belts and road initiatives to build infrastructure and increase its influence in mostly developing nations it's large as has come a huge cost for many of the $138.00 nations that have signed up to the program you may remember sri lanka couldn't keep up with payments on the ports and eventually had to hand over the facility on a 100 year lease many nations have been rethinking their involvement amid

accusations china was over pricing road and rail links. trying to understand just how much money beijing has lent the world has been a challenge for many but the kill in situ for the world economy has managed to cut through the opaque lending practices it says between 2 $12017.00 the world's debt obligations to china rose from $500000000000.00 to a staggering 5 trillion dollars that's about 6 percent of the world's economic output most of that has been bought on international debt markets beijing and its subsidiaries of lent $1.00 trillion dollars directly to $150.00 nations that makes china the world's biggest creditor overtaking the i.m.f. and even world bank or beijing has also made unreported loans worth $200000000000.00 which is wiring as other investors and international lenders can't make accurate investment decisions over recent years washington has grown reluctant

to bail out ations time to china's initiatives through the i.m.f. and world bank let's bring in the author of that report 1st of christoph trash good to have you with us 1st of all one color of lend is beijing is it fair to describe it as private trying. i wouldn't use the word i think. it was just let me where china can be characterised in 3 main ways 1st it states driven meaning that it is the government entities who are almost all of the and then being overseas 2nd it is all. meaning that china and its entities only do not share details on where it lands and at what terms and 3rd is as a market based spike that's being a state lender the loan term slow caruthers like private law in terms of

yet restraints are comparatively higher maturity is a comparative short this is u.s. dollar in debt and there are strings attached for example collateral clauses that would guarantee china repayment in case of a default for example by our oil export proceeds do some of those details difficult widely from what other world powers might offer for example and what you make of beijing's line that really at the heart of all of this is a lot of resistance from other world powers who don't want to see china take its rightful place on the world stage. so i would say what china is doing at the moment is very reminiscent of what rising powers have done in the past so i don't see many differences there to the rise of say the u.k. in the in 1000 sentry or the rise of the us in the 20th century. those rising powers extend their footprint globally by trade by our finance and by the military

and china is doing just the same so it is no surprise that china is extending more and more low winds and is integrating economically and financially with the rest of the world especially not in markets so is taking money from beijing more of a problem then compared to taking money from other institutions if not all of the world powers know the world bank so i wouldn't call it a problem i would say the it's a very different deal that you get from from say a loan by the world bank of china china usually lens as part of a package where you might get an infrastructure. construction project that is financed. by a chinese loans and implemented by chinese for chinese workers and the terms there are market oriented right so. there are to be high interest rates whereas the world

bank does not offer these package deals that in my request political conditions but the interest rates are usually low then it's concession on some maturity so long as all these are loans that are easier back than the ones that china or i well in addition to that there is the concern over china's hidden debt why is that an issue. it is an issue because for a risk pricing say i'm going bester and i want to buy a sovereign bonds of the african nations then $1.00 of the fundamental things i want to know is whether you know what the debt stop looks like and how much debt is coming due in the coming years and that information is lacking for many countries with regard to the large chinese debts so market risk pricing of sovereign bonds is impaired by the lack of transparency in our view and also sustainability analysis mako risk analysis they want to judge the likelihood of

a financial distress fault then i need to know what how the debts and that you are looks like and that information is that king for the chinese and that's a major problem is the situation compounded by china's holdings of german euro bonds u.s. treasuries except for i would say that's a bit of a different story so. i mean there's also not much transparency with regard to the holdings of china's central bank so we don't know how much exactly of advanced countries that they have been you know purchasing in the past but that's a very different set up because those are market based instruments and germany knows very well you know how much debt it has it has sold to the market which was then purchased at secondary market by chinese entities. that the real problem is with the developing country loans that are not picked up by you know any market

based institutions say they fall to the cracks the rating agencies are bloomberg don't have them you know basically there is no way to get this information whereas for sovereign bonds of the bronze countries there's much more point have the chinese been willing to renegotiate debt to forgive debt. so in the past they have done so in multiple cases more than 100 cases since fact. but the approach was case by case so they would really go she ate with individual debtor countries they did not take part in these coordinated effort to finish the tips which other government lenders took part in are the i.m.f. the world bank took part in china it was kind of a side did its own deals and most of these deals were actually maturity extensions so a you know. lengthening of the debt. maturity but not actual that forgiveness like we've seen for the parents but governments so it

remains to be seen whether you know they will change that approach and be part of the more global coordinated initiative and whether they will agree to face value that right balance that's to be the question of these debts in dollars because there's a question if they if they are how they've been able to remain hidden and avoid u.s. scrutiny. so they are in u.s. dollars think that u.s. government you know as not. to my knowledge at least track these many confused themselves who are scrutiny has come from the academic side so they have been very important attempts by teams in the united states. or sites cari where researchers have invested years and years of housing together all these lending information on chinese activities and loans abroad. and that has you

know added a lot of transparency and our study goes in that same direction in trying to shed light and it's very. hard. lending activity that china is engaging in and in the large volume that's very important so scrutiny has has really come from get them excited all right thanks so much for your thoughts on that professor christoph try bash thank you very much. a 2nd dear amy and all tanka has entered venezuelan waters carrying much needed fuel the united states has imposed sanctions on both countries and says it's monitoring the situation of venezuela and iran have warned washington not to interfere with deliveries so i suppose reports. the iranian oil tanker fortune is quoted by the venezuelan military in the caribbean sea it's just one of the 5 tankers carrying over 1500000 liters of gasoline it's heading towards the refinery in the state of qatar will. president

says he's country has a right to import gasoline to monitor we have the right to trade freely in the seas of the world in the skies of the world the tweeners between iran and venezuela to exchange products to par products from or to sell products to us but not everyone agrees. actually the united states washington has already imposed sanctions on both countries and is considering new ones gasoline is cars in venezuela due to a near complete breakdown of its refining network years of mismanagement and lack of investment have had a devastating effect into what once was one of the biggest oil exporters in the world the venezuelan government imposed a strict lockdown almost 2 months ago to deter the spread of call that 19 most gas stations in caracas are closed and in the ones that are open people have to line up

for hours and the whole maze they come here every month and it takes us one night i came at 5 and i have to stay until the next day i only get 20 liters. gasoline from iran will only last for a while it won't change anything there are political reasons social economic we depend on the offshore riches to give us gas and letters move it will last only for a few munger's. iran has become a strategic partner for venezuela see what chavez came to power in the past months venezuela relied on companies like russia's hoss nafta for gasoline but the situation has changed in the past year. by rosneft stop being interested in venezuela mostly because of the sanctions it has to do with strategic decisions they will have to invest lots of money and there are so many troubles in venezuela that people are not attracted to iran is a desperate measure for a country that has been collapsing for years. a desperate measure that will give

the government some air in the months ahead but that won't solve the endemic troubles venezuela is facing today now on may the 6th 2010 an unexplained glitch rattled the s. and p. $500.00 temporarily wiping one trillion dollars off its value is fair to say that to this day no one has been able to figure out what exactly went wrong almost 5 years later u.s. authorities had finally caught up with the man they blame for triggering the crash of a time 36 year old move in the surround was day trading out of his parents' west london home are known to his family he had amassed a $70000000.00 fortune the arrest was met with incredulity while most insiders thought high frequency trading and the rise of algorithms were to blame. well my next guest financial journalist and author liam vaughn has written a book called flash crash he's examined the claims the window was sentenced in

january to a year in the home detention why let's serve bring in then mr von why don't we start by asking you what you thought of him so have been dissing surround is a kind of a fascinating character he grew up in a fairly modest house in hands loaches below the heathrow client half he was about as far removed from the kind of world of high finance will she is as you can get he got his breaking trading by applying to an ad for in a newspaper which literally said wanted futures traders he started out of what was then called a trading arcade where basically there was a fund one of the traders to see if they could make it buying and selling financial futures as a say a long way from the likes of j.p. morgan or the world quite finance but never was just an incredibly gifted trader a real natural in the job and he had amazing mental arithmetic skills.

and of focus that there was some extreme that he would literally train for hours and hours at a time without a break. and he also had this amazing ability to completely disregard the value of money. so he would bet increasingly large sums without really caring too much either way whether he won or lost and those combination of characteristics combined you know to sell and to be extremely successful well how did he make his money there was it all down to long hours and intelligence and ability to read the markets or something else. yes my book sort of tracks the journey of nav from those of humble beginnings where he starts working in this arcade with all the other young kind of one of these really and he progresses very quickly his specific style of trading is not try and predict which

way you know interest rates are going to move or whether a company's line to do well and he focused on a very short term started trading which is known scalping which is really just about looking at all does coming into the leaving the market and trying to use that data to predict which way the market is about to move on a very very short term basis and so nerves kind of sense of actually very well suited to that style of trading and so you made ahead of our money doing that the between 2003 when he started in 2009 he made 15000000 pounds a lot of that in his bedroom in his parents' house and found the way the book is interesting and when the subject matter starts to become really fascinating is that in around 2007 or 2008 the market started to be increasingly infiltrated by a new type of market participant known as high frequency traders the which are

essentially kind of autonomous preprogramed robots that reacts up fresh information incredibly quickly and these robots essentially squee each human beings like now they're out of the market. and they kind of twist of fate where the story turns is that rather than quitting which is what a number of pennies. you know pay group did now have made a fateful decision that he would fight back and he built his own machine he called it the nav trader and what it did is it fire falls orders into the market and then quickly cancel them but in doing so he would trip the algorithms about which way the market was about to move and he would capitalize on that short term move. and it was a bit of a pass as a thing or was any of that illegal. well yes and that was the only downfall in the whole thing it was illegal i mean one of the discussions in the book is at what point does it become illegal the rules around what he was doing which is known as

spoofing came into force in 2011. you know your eagle eyed viewers will note that the flash crash happened in 2010 so there was some argument made that you know what he was doing wasn't illegal at the time but he was also charged with fraud so yes it was but i think what made nab such a compelling character is that lots of people believed that the marketplace that he was operating in was itself increasingly kind of dominated by entities that the used nefarious practices. and you know there's a famous book by michael lewis who flash boys which goes into that and the contrivances around high frequency trading so now have argued not just when he was arrested that's rats career that he was operating in a rude market and therefore he was doing was a form of fighting back and what i imagine as you were size clothes that was going to be my next point that what does the evidence show were bigger firms doing

exactly the same thing he was or something very similar anyway at the time i mean it you know is and you want to question in terms of sleuthing. a number of high frequency trading firms have been charge you supposing since nabs arrest so that so that is a fair point but what i think the traders do is often closer to the you know is within the line of the law but if you were to explain it to other people you would argue that it may be. it ethically raised other questions so for example high frequency traders would look for holders coming into the market by say a very large pension fund and they were used to typical analysis and high speed computers to determine which way the market's about to move and then jump ahead of it so what ends up happening is that that pension fund will desolately worst price in trading and you know critics will say that doesn't actually provide any social

good and is actually a form of front running the activity firms themselves would argue actually it provides a service to the market and provides liquidity and you know to me it's legal but it's certainly a moral gray area even if it's not a legal one. side of the moral gray area when we are this is the argument that big trading houses have employed similar if not the same tactics but they get a gentle slap on the wrist because when you know when they've got wayward traders on their boats because they have great influence because they have the argument goes cushy relationships with the markets because markets regulate themselves so any truth to that i mean it's definitely true the largest trading houses have great relationships with the regulators you know for example who moves on stuffing themselves only came in in 2011 some of the biggest advocates for those rules with the high frequency trading firms and the reason for that is because if they can't

predict which way the market's going to move accurately than a heart may shoot amounts of money that they're used to making and then you have someone like now have you literally you know is operating in his bedroom playing markets like a computer games but no access to lawyers or compliance offices. you know and there's a sort shoosh gulf between those 22 things the only thing i would say is that now have didn't necessarily always make life easy point self so for example when the regulators started kind of snooping around what he was doing so he had this kind of slightly. lower tarion street which maybe didn't help his cause in the end or or what happened to them when there's money in the end that's really a story in itself isn't there. yes so one of the twists and turns of the book and into story is that he was a quiet you know humble guy didn't really spend any of the money that he murdered

and in fact the parents didn't even know what he was doing. $70000000.00 when the f.b.i. turned up and when he was taken to prison and his bio were set at $5000000.00 pounds which should have been an easy something to get his hands on base and she moaned. but unfortunately he had intrusted his money to a kind of literally so-called investment advisers and when now it's lawyers started running them up and trying to get hold of the money to get him out of prison quickly materialize at the money wasn't a bone say. and you know there was this great irony i guess that this guy who was accused of being a criminal mastermind was potentially himself the victim of so much more unscrupulous investment types so incredible story isn't it thanks so much for coming in and sharing your insights about the story about the vendor thank you so much time ends 4000000 migrant workers are more vulnerable than ever after

a recent layoff stu's of the covert 19 pandemic with most borders closed thousands of stranded and relying on handouts scott highly reports from some would suck on. about an hour south of bangkok a summit so called the hub for thailand's seafood industry and home to the largest population of migrant workers in the country primarily from e.m.r. . up now because of the covert 1000 shutdown many are without jobs and are relying on food handouts to prevent the spread of the virus thailand sealed it borders with neighboring countries back in march stranding tens of thousands of migrant workers mostly without any assistance from the thai government. mom momo had been a garment factory worker here for 9 years she lost her job when the shutdown started to take hold any. they a combination am i don't know this crisis is probably the worst one that i've experienced there are no jobs in the market and i couldn't find work i haven't paid

my rent for the past 2 months she only has another few weeks to pay what she owes before she and her family are kicked out they want to go home to mandalay and man mark but can't the average daily salary for my coworkers here in some 2nd province is only $10.00 that goes for those who are working on fishing boats the factory workers now there's growing concern that jobs like this could become a few are once thailand fully reopened for business too tony gallic lies says thousands of workers have called her migrant worker rights network seeking help from the organisation has been providing food bags for a family but to talk to any admits even if the migrants are able to get to their home countries they'll end up coming back to thailand once there's work she says they'll return even more vulnerable than before the pandemic. i'm worried that the workers will be forced to work for longer hours for a small low wage they're quite vulnerable unlike us who have more rights and more power i think fewer workers will be employed but. the thai government has opened

a selected border checkpoints for a limited number of workers to return home each day but many don't have the money to travel. a few fortunate ones are able to get some work but most remain stuck on land facing mounting debt that will have to be paid back when they do finally find a job. and that's our show for this week but remember you can get in touch with us via twitter use the hash tag a j c d c when you do or drop us an e-mail account of the cost of al-jazeera dot net is our address there's more for you on live at al-jazeera dot com slash c t c that'll take you straight to our page which has individual reports links and entire episodes for you to catch up on. that's it for this edition of counting the cost time sammy's a ban from the whole team here thanks for joining us the news and al-jazeera is next.

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union received the 1st vaccine batches and get ready to be.