"A copy of the loan contract reviewed by NPR shows that if Montenegro is not able to repay China’s state-owned Export-Import Bank on time, the bank then has the right to seize land inside Montenegro, as long as it doesn’t belong to the military or is used for diplomatic purposes. "
That seems fairly normal to me for an asset backed loan.
Not normal if it’s any land that is not the land belonging to the asset.
I’m not an expert on this, but you can offer up one asset to secure a loan on another.
For example, if you have two houses, you can secure a loan to buy a third house using one of the two you own.
That’s true, you can offer other assets as collateral to secure a loan, but that is typically for unsecured loans (where the loan is not applied to some underlying asset). In this case, the underlying asset, the highway and presumably also the land for the highway, would likely be the collateral on the loan.
In any case, one should be extremely wary of state actors in the case of sovereign debt. The potential geopolitical risk can be great, as we saw in the case of Greece when it tried to default on its debt.
Isnt NPR state-controlled media from the USA? Definitely not a neutral source on China to say the least.
They’ve had all kinds of corporate sponsors, even the Koch brothers, but anyone who’s listened to them during the last 2 US election cycles can tell in the coverage they’re an arm of the US democratic party / citigroup. My wife had to stop listening because of how unbearable it became.
Its somewhat difficult to find, but according to this, about half of their revenue comes from corporate sponsorship. I tried to find a breakdown of how much each donates, but couldn’t. Here’s the list anyway.
Someone is real naive if they see any mainstream [country] news and doesn’t think the [country]'s government at least has a hand in it. There is basically no independent journalism anywhere.
NPR isn’t state controlled per se, but they probably report whatever the state department tells them all the same.
It has its biases, but just because it receives some government funding doesn’t make it state-controlled. Whereas with RT and People’s Daily you can assume their contents is inline with the state, NPR is more than happy to bite the hand that feeds it, corporate, philanthropist or government. What biases are there generally come from the individual reporters being human beings.
NPR is independent and receives less then 1% funding from the federal government unfortunately (if you listen to regular NPR on the radio you will undoubtedly hear there funding drives which can last several days).
It was created with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadcasting. It’s literally meant to be state-sponsored propaganda. Except it talks more about China, and Russia than a lack of healthcare, or a decrepet infrastructure.
NPR talks a lot about the failings of the US’s health care infrastructure. It talks a bit less about infrastructure, but it certainly discusses it.
Ignoring my opinions on China and Russia, a newspaper that talks more about foreign countries than local news is a pretty shitty newspaper.
News in the US is hyper local. This is actually one of the few news sources regular (elderly) US citizen have that talk about foreign events from time to time. Biased? Probably. But still better then nothing.
