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G7 aims to raise $600 billion to counter China's Belt and Road

SCHLOSS ELMAU, Germany, June 26 (Reuters) - Group of Seven leaders on Sunday pledged to raise $600 billion in private and public funds over five years to finance needed infrastructure in developing countries and counter China's older, multitrillion-dollar Belt and Road project.

U.S. President Joe Biden and other G7 leaders relaunched the newly renamed "Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment," at their annual gathering being held this year at Schloss Elmau in southern Germany.


https://www.reuters.com/world/refile-us-...022-06-26/

Just reading the headline, I thought for a moment that the G7 is finally getting serious in offering something to developing nations. Then this weasel phrase "$600 billion in private and public funds" appears right at the first paragraph --- not a good sign as there is no breakdown how much exactly is private how much is public. This phrase is so generic and wide enough that $0.1billion committed public and $599.9billiion "potential" private funding can also fit into it.

The reality is if the risk value proposition is tenable private investors would have been there in a heartbeat, they don't need seven old politicians to wayang in front of the cameras to tell them they can invest in developing nations. So the question really is how much government money has actually been committed from this G7 meeting?

From the same article, we get these really miserable and derisory actual government commitments:

Together with G7 members and the EU, Washington will also provide $3.3 million in technical assistance to Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will also commit up to $50 million over five years to the World Bank’s global Childcare Incentive Fund

These amounts are so pathetic that Biden had to throw out a $2billion number of some solar power project in Angola which is in fact a private investment by a private US company Urban Green Technologies (UGT). The only role the US government played in this project was to instruct the government controlled Export-Import Bank to provide loans to UGT for this project. Like that also count?