Russia owes China $169 billion as sanctions deepen Beijing’s financial leverage

Filed 21h ago · Via NV · The Buffoon Desk

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Bad Ideas (clean)

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: "Copyright 1955 Paramount Pictures Corporation" · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Russia owes China $169 billion, the largest single debt in a World Bank and Yahoo Finance dataset tracking $1.031 trillion owed to China across 30 countries. Together with Venezuela's $113 billion and Iran's $28 billion, the three sanctioned economies account for roughly 30 percent of Beijing's total lending portfolio.

Analysts cited in the data say this concentration lets China dictate discount terms on oil and raw materials while converting financial dependence into direct political leverage over Moscow, Caracas and Tehran. Pakistan, Angola, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Brazil and several dozen other countries round out a debt ledger spanning every continent.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

You cut a man off from every bank in town and he doesn't stop needing money, he just finds the one lender left standing and signs whatever's put in front of him. That's Moscow's situation with Beijing in a nutshell, and it was entirely foreseeable to anyone who's watched a neighbor go from the regular bank to the title loan place down the highway. The sanctions did their job on paper; they just handed the leverage to a different capital.

Source: Read the original at NV → Scored: Bad Ideas (clean) · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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