Month: May 2021

The United States will share the results of a new deep-dive by its top intelligence agencies into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed millions of people across the globe.

Before boarding Air Force One on Thursday for a visit to Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters he would make the findings of the 90-day review public, “unless there’s something I’m unaware of.”

Biden ordered the fresh review Wednesday amid?growing speculation?that?COVID-19?might have?leaked from a Chinese laboratory, with the White House promising to make additional resources available, including from the country’s national labs.

Top U.S. intelligence agencies said last year that their information supported “the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified” but that they would “continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence” to determine whether the outbreak began after the virus was transmitted to humans from animals in nature or as the result of a laboratory accident.

In a new statement Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said U.S. intelligence agencies are still trying to answer the question surrounding its origin.

“The U.S. Intelligence Community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, or it was a laboratory accident,” said ODNI spokeswoman Amanda Schoch.

“The majority of elements within the IC do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,” she added.

The statement confirmed Biden’s assertion that two of the three top intelligence agencies were leaning more towards one of the scenarios, but that all three had only “low or moderate confidence” in their assessments.

U.S. officials?have stressed for months that a lack of cooperation from the Chinese government hinders outside efforts to learn more about?the origins of the coronavirus that has killed?at least 3.4 million?people worldwide, including nearly 600,000 in the United States.??

In an interview with Fox News late Wednesday, the top U.S. military official repeated the criticism of China’s handling of the outbreak.

“Once this virus started appearing, there seems to have been a fair amount of activity or cover-up or lack of transparency, probably the best way to put it, and all of that is disturbing,” said General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ?”I think that the president is exactly right, we need to get to the bottom of it.”?

Some U.S. lawmakers are also expressing frustration with China.

“After 15 months we have zero evidence or proof that the #Covid19 pandemic began naturally from an animal to a human,” Marco Rubio, the lead Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, tweeted Thursday.

In a statement Wednesday, Adam Schiff, Democratic chairperson of the House Intelligence Committee, accused China of serving to “delay the vital work necessary to help the world better prepare itself before the next potential pandemic.”

The?Wall Street Journal?on Monday cited a U.S. intelligence report that researchers at a Wuhan, China,?lab fell ill in November 2019, a month?before?the Chinese government reported?to the World Health Organization the first cases of the illness that would be designated as COVID-19.??

“It is most likely that this is a virus that arose?naturally,?but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident,”?Dr. Francis Collins, the National Institutes of Health director,?told?Senate lawmakers?at a hearing?on Wednesday.??

The?WHO, which is to conduct the second phase of an inquiry?into?the virus’s?origins, has faced mounting criticism for dismissing the possibility?that?the new coronavirus?escaped from?the Chinese?scientific facility,?a supposition that?officials in Beijing have repeatedly rejected.?

Two months ago, the organization concluded in a report?that?it was?”extremely unlikely”?that COVID-19 had?escaped from the Wuhan lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.??

Collins told senators that?the?report?”satisfied nobody”?and?”this time we need a really expert-driven,?no-holds-barred?collection of information, which is how we’re mostly really going to find out what happened.”?

Source: Voice Of America

WASHINGTON – In the year since the COVID-19 pandemic threw the global economy into a tailspin, the level of global debt — money owed by governments, businesses and households — has jumped by 12% to $289 trillion. And while some countries appear to have begun the task of reducing overall indebtedness, many governments in countries transitioning to full market economies are finding it difficult to do so.

According to data collected by the Institute of International Finance, the largest share of the $30 trillion in borrowing that has occurred since the end of 2019 has been done by sovereign governments, which took on $13.4 trillion in additional debt over that period.

While many advanced economies are finding their footing again, with vaccination rates rising and infection rates falling, the progress against the pandemic in countries not yet fully integrated into the global economy — known as “emerging markets” — is highly variable. This means that in some countries that borrowed heavily during the past year, interest payments on debt have increased, even as tax revenue and other income have been slashed by lower economic output.

Across the 31 emerging market countries tracked by the IIF data, government debt increased by 15% between the end of 2019 and the end of the first quarter of this year. Outliers included the Czech Republic and Ghana, which saw their sovereign debt grow by more than 35% during that period, as well as the Philippines, China, Indonesia and Israel, all of which saw an increase of more than 25%.

Debt payments growing

This leaves experts worried not just about how countries will pay their newly accumulated debts, but whether they will have the financial capacity to respond to new economic shocks in the future.

The more debt a country accumulates, the less confident lenders become in its ability to successfully take on additional loans — resulting in higher interest rates and eventually, an inability to access cash from global capital markets. This can handcuff a government trying to respond to an emergency, be it a pandemic, natural disaster or armed conflict.

According to Emre Tiftik, director of sustainability research at the IFF, the spike in indebtedness among emerging market economies came at the end of more than a decade in which their borrowing was already on the rise.

Winners and losers

Increased borrowing “can be good or bad,” Tiftik said. “If the proceeds are used wisely in a productive way, that can help to boost the economic activity and boost potential growth, most importantly, and will create new jobs. But unfortunately, when we look across the spectrum, there are some winners and there are some losers. Many of them have been using this rapid pace of debt accumulation for short-term gains, to boost economic activity in the short term at the cost of delaying [addressing] problems to another time.”

Then came the pandemic. Tiftik said with debt levels already very high, some emerging market countries were unable to borrow on good terms and either took on more onerous debt or were forced to scale back efforts to protect their citizens from the worst of the pandemic’s impact.

Tiftik said his major concern is that many of these countries have already stretched their borrowing capacity greatly and are far from seeing the end of the pandemic, meaning their economic output will recover more slowly than can be expected in mature markets.

“Now, they are much more vulnerable to unexpected shocks,” he said.

Mature markets borrowed more

The governments in mature markets such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany borrowed even more than those in emerging markets during the pandemic, and in general, they carry a higher debt-to-gross domestic product ratio. But they also enjoy much larger capacity to service debt, and in the case of nations like the U.S., are borrowing in a currency that they themselves control.

Some countries in the category of mature markets increased their debt levels dramatically during the pandemic. Estonia, for example, increased its debt by 92% during the pandemic, but from a very low baseline of just $3 billion. Other countries with particularly large increases included New Zealand at 81%, Slovakia at 59%, and Australia at 56%.

Countries in the euro area increased their sovereign debt by an average of 20%, though with widely differing margins. Denmark, for example, increased its obligations by just 12%, while Luxembourg’s debt increased by 41%.

US still borrowing

While the majority of the 28 mature market economies followed by the IIF began taking steps to reduce debt levels in the first quarter of 2021, the U.S. was not among them, adding an additional $372 billion in borrowing to a national debt that stands at more than $27 trillion.

For fiscal hawks, who understood the necessity of additional borrowing in response to the pandemic, the continued increase in the national debt — even as the country appears to be recovering well — is a real concern.

“I’m not aware of any other country that’s done the kind of borrowing we have in 2021,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

It was one thing, he said, when the U.S. was part of a concerted global effort to avoid an economic catastrophe by issuing new sovereign debt. But now that many advanced economies are paring back their debt rather than issuing more, the dynamics have changed.

“We’re going to leave this crisis with a lot of global debt, and also a lot of global savings. But it seems that in the United States, our new debt is going to ultimately exceed our new savings, because we’re rowing in a different direction from the rest of the world.”

Source: Voice Of America