gifts have also dried up now she says she just wants to finish school the contour for elizabeth al-jazeera. but in a special program this week which is hero will be looking at the devastation caused by covert 19 in the years since the virus emerged and its frank scenes offer hope of protection will be oskin how long it could take for the world to recover you can see that on thursday at 1800 hours g.m.t. syria. it is good to have you with us hello adrian figure here in doha the headlines are up as they are at the u.s. house of representatives has backed a 3 fold increase in direct prim demick relief checks to $2000.00 the measure will need a 2 thirds majority in the senate to pass the house is also overturned president trump's veto of the annual defense spending bill. president elect joe biden has hit

out again over the lack of information his transition team is getting from trump's administration biden warned that he still being obstructed on national security issues and that key agencies have been severely damaged by trump's policies. the government of bangladesh has started to read a case of 2nd group of rohingya refugees who fled from me a mop up to 1800 refugees are being moved from their camps in cox's bazar to an island in the bay of bengal that's prone to flooding the u.n. human rights groups who condemn the relocation of the child 3 reports from chittagong in bangladesh it took barely one and a half hour to clear 800 rowing a refugee is in navy vessel to had towards the coast char island which is about $2.00 to $2.00 and a half hour journey 42 kilometers from here i spoke to the neville come on day i was in charge of operation that why and listen others local john is the

international law and they said the facilities are good everything is there you all will be going there so on but today's operation is done they'll be a next batch we don't know exactly when south africa's president so rama poses announced strict measures to combat a surge in coronavirus cases driven by a fast spreading variant became the 1st african country to pass 1000000 infections indoor and outdoor gatherings will be banned at a curfew will be forced the family of a prominent saudi women's rights activists say they will appeal her jail sentence to jane who was sentenced to 5 and a half years in prison monday during international condemnation a relative say she's been sexually assaulted and tortured while in prison that's if you're up to date more news feed him down to 0 after counting the cost next. mark had 3 jobs and now i only have one but i'm soo providing for my family. and

the 1st time i was admitted to hospital i didn't show any signs of imus. and all that but at about my opinion i might have become very past and stop thinking about the negative sides of farmers just get on al-jazeera. he is from the us living with m. and s. in egypt. sami'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 $32.00 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 belt and road initiatives to build infrastructure and increase its influence in mostly developing nations its land jass 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 port 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 $115.00 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 kind 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 as a market based spike that's being a state lender the loan term slow corrupt there like private law in terms of

yet restraints are comparatively higher maturity is a comparative short this is us dollar and 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 century 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's no surprise that china is extending more and more the lower limbs and is integrating economically and financially with the rest of the world especially making markets so is taking money from beijing more of a problem then compared to taking money from other institutions if not all 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 to back them than the ones that china offer 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 bonds of the african nations then $1.00 of the fundamental things i want to know is whether you know what the debts 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 debt and the debt 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 debt 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 on secondary market by chinese entities the 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 a debt to forgive debt. so in the past day they have done so in multiple cases more than 100 cases since fact. but the approach was case by case so they would renegotiate with individual debtor countries they did not take part in these coordinated effort to finish or 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 if you. lengthening of the debt. maturity but not actual debt forgiveness like we've seen for the parents but governments so immense

that you see in 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 you know 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 us scrutiny. so they are in u.s. dollars think that the u.s. government you know has not. to my knowledge at least tracked these these many confuse themselves or what scrutiny has come from the academic side so they have been very important attempts by you know teams in the united states 8 or size cari where researchers have invested a years and years of putting together all these lending information on chinese activities and loans abroad. and that has you know added

a lot of transparency in our study goes in that same direction in trying to shed light in this very on this very hard. lending activity that china is engaging in and given the large volume that's very important so scrutiny has has really come from the economic side all right thanks so much for your thoughts. professor christophe thank you very much. a 2nd the raimi an all time has entered venezuelan waters carrying much needed fuel the united states has imposed sanctions on both countries and says it's more the situation venezuela and iran have warned washington not to interfere with deliveries stories about 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

a war. president says he's country has a right to import gasoline to the miniature we have the right to trade freely in the seas of the world in the skies of the world between us between iran and venezuela to exchange products to buy products from or to sell products to us but not everyone agrees especially 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 in 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. nick we depend on the offer riches to give us gas and letters move it will last only for a few months. iran has become a strategic partner for venezuela see as well chavis came to power in the past months many relied on companies like russia's hoss nafta for gasoline but the situation has changed in the past year iran if not the. 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 is being collapsing for years and desperate measure that will give

their government some air in the months ahead but that won't solve the endemic troubles venezuela is facing today now in may the 6th 2010 an unexplained glitch rattled the s. and p. $500.00 temporarily wiping one trillion dollars off its value it's 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 and 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 vaughan 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 even dissing surround is a kind of a fascinating character he grew up in a fairly modest house in hans loaches below the heathrow flight half he was about as far removed from the kind of world of high finance will she is as you can get he got he's breaking trading by applying to an ad for in a newspaper which literally said wanted futures traders he started out 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.

focus that there was some extreme that he would literally train for hours and hours at a time without a branch 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 to learn 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 books of tracks the journey of now have from those of humble beginnings where he starts working at 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 start of trading which is known scalping which is really just about looking at alders coming into leaving the market and trying to use that data to predict which way the market is about to lose on a very very short basis and so nerves kind of sense of actually beautiful 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 that 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 afresh 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 plays. 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. 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 incredibly fast 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 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 use nefarious practices. and you know there's a famous book by michael lewis who flash boys which goes into that and the controversies 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 came out as you were sized down was going to be my next point with 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 it's 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 which is within the line of the war but if you were to explain it to other people you would argue that it may be. you know ethically it raises other questions so for example high frequency traders will 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 were 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 actually than a hard make issues 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 is 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 are 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 he's by a reset 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 nash lawyers started running them up and trying to get hold of the money to get him out of prison it quickly materialized that the money wasn't available to him. 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 is there 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 recent

layoffs due to 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 stuck on 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. maher mo-mo had been a garment factory worker here for 9 years she lost her job when the shutdown started to take hold any. the 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 families 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 smaller wage they're quite vulnerable unlike us who have more rights and more power i think fewer 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 they'll 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 the entire episode for you to catch up on. that's it for this edition of counting the cost time sammy's a ban from the whole tune here thanks for joining us the news and al-jazeera is next.

january on al-jazeera it's 10 years since the arab spring sought to bring change to the middle east al-jazeera looks into how successful look at pollutions what a new documentary series examine from the street and see it takes in drug trafficking and the way states and drug lords used it as an instrument to power spikes in nations a big goal down to around the world hope of returning to normal comes back again we need chimes constantly changing listening post continues to analyze companies is coming up to one of the most intense election campaigns the u.s. is sent to an old you're right it's cool to 6 presidents. january on al-jazeera. is the year of extreme challenges and i'm certain t comes to an end. we look ahead to potential major stories of 2021 through a series of in-depth special reports. joining us as we assess the global impact of

what is to come next year. hello i'm a very unforgiving doha the top stories on al-jazeera the u.s. house of representatives is back to 3 fold increase in direct pandemic relief checks to $2000.00 the measure would need a 2 thirds majority in the senate to pass the house as also over to the president on the trumps veto of the annual defense spending bill president elect joe biden has hit out again over the lack of information that his transition team is getting from trump's administration by and warned that he's still being obstructed on national security issues and that key agencies have been severely damaged by trump's policies the.