- 6 months ago
A luxury hotel in a former military zone off Albania’s coast: What US President Trump has to do with it. How tariffs affect wounded Ukrainian soldiers. How a strong US dollars weakens the US economy. And will Bitcoin become the new global reserve currency?
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00:00A luxury hotel where sharpshooting once took place.
00:05And what U.S. President Donald Trump has to do with it.
00:08Off the coast of Albania, Trump's son-in-law is planning a first-class hotel
00:13in the middle of a former military zone.
00:19The Albanian government supports the plans,
00:21but nature conservationists are strongly opposed.
00:24They're afraid it'll cause major damage to the environment.
00:30Also coming up on the show,
00:39what the draconian U.S. tariffs mean for wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
00:44The strong U.S. dollar, which is weakening the U.S. economy.
00:48And will the global currency soon be replaced by bitcoins anyway?
01:00It's a 30-minute ride to Sazan via speedboat from the Albanian mainland.
01:07Activist Besan Yaguri is making a reconnaissance trip to the island,
01:13which is out of bounds to the public.
01:15Now deserted, Sazan has an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers.
01:22And it's here that Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner,
01:26intends to build a spacious luxury hotel resort.
01:30This island is a military zone.
01:35Normally you cannot enter or you cannot go there without permission.
01:40It's for safety reasons.
01:45It's important strategically for Albania.
01:48But the surrounding of the island is all protected marine area.
01:54We pass an old navy boat as we reach land,
01:57where we're swiftly intercepted by soldiers.
02:00We're told no filming allowed,
02:02and that it's best we leave because of the landmines here.
02:05We claim we're only interested in the donkey.
02:09The remnants of an old military fortress built by fascist Italy's occupying forces during World War II.
02:21Jared Kushner's firm, Atlantic Incubation Partners,
02:24plans to invest around $1.4 billion in the island
02:28and was given preliminary approval in December 2024.
02:32But the 37-year-old activist remains determined to stop the project getting off the ground.
02:38This project, it has the base in the island
02:41and it will be enlarged on the other side of the island in the coast,
02:46where is the most sensitive area, where is the delta of the Viosa.
02:51The crystal clear waters appeal to both tourists and divers.
02:55But we leave before there's any trouble with the soldiers
02:58and return to the mainland coast, where the river Salza flows into the sea.
03:03We're only allowed here because we're with a ranger.
03:10That's because the river delta is a nature reserve,
03:15right across from Trump Island, as the locals call it.
03:20This project, it will require investment.
03:26It will require a lot of infrastructure.
03:29We're talking about the project that is inside in the island,
03:33which is isolated, has no water.
03:35That means water for building the apartments, a yacht harbor, sewage systems,
03:41swimming pools and drinking water supply would all have to come from the mainland.
03:50Basically, you're urbanizing this area.
03:53So from a bird's paradise and a nature paradise, you turn it into a small city.
04:00Kushner plans a resort in Svernets at the cost of these beaches.
04:06In return, an estimated 1,000 new jobs in upscale tourism would be created.
04:12There definitely going to be more tourists coming here, but foreigners,
04:17not Albanian people coming here.
04:19And there will be definitely new jobs, but not for Albanian people.
04:22We know that these investments come with their own staff, with their own people,
04:27and they will not definitely hire local people here from the area to work in this resource.
04:43Even the music now caters to tourists.
04:46In 2024, 12 million vacationers visited Albania.
04:51They spent 4.5 billion euros.
04:54Tourism accounts for a quarter of the country's gross domestic product,
04:58and one in five jobs.
05:03Prime Minister Edy Rama is promoting this economic sector.
05:08Rama has apparently been supportive of Kushner's construction projects on the island in recent years.
05:14Albania's tourism industry is booming.
05:17Dozens of hotels and restaurants are being built along the coast, such as in Albania's third-largest city, Vlora, near the island of Sazan.
05:26Locals are divided over Kushner's luxury resort plan.
05:30I don't think it's a bad thing for someone to invest in your country, especially if you're not able to create that opportunity for yourself.
05:41Sazan will become the pearl of the Balkans.
05:45We'll just be spectators, seeing it but not being able to enjoy it.
05:49Shame on the people of Vlora for not standing up to someone from America taking over.
05:55He's going to claim all of Vlora for himself.
05:58It's a good thing for us, for Vlora.
06:01Actually, it's good for everyone in Albania.
06:04We requested a meeting in the capital Tirana with Prime Minister Rama and his ministers.
06:12None were available to comment.
06:17Perhaps that's because many opposition politicians and experts view the luxury resort project as a bad deal.
06:26The state has pledged free water, sewage infrastructure and electricity.
06:33Critics say the government is trying to curry favour with the Trump family.
06:38There are concerns about transparency.
06:43In this case, it looks like an offer that Prime Minister Rama is doing to the Trump family.
06:54more than one well-desired, well-received American investment in Albanian economy.
07:01Back by the coast, Besan Yaguri takes us to a site north of Vlora,
07:06where the government says the largest airport in the Balkans is being built.
07:11It's expected to handle 750,000 visitors a year with direct flights to the U.S. planned.
07:18The Kushner project is one of the many projects that would come,
07:22but it's a big project, it's a huge project that will need infrastructure,
07:27and the airport is one of them.
07:31Efforts to block the island's luxury resort are struggling.
07:34The initial phase of construction work is scheduled to begin this November.
07:39Modern prosthetics are very expensive.
07:53But they're important for wounded Ukrainian soldiers, to help them cope reasonably well.
08:00A U.S. company is developing and building machines that are sent to Ukraine to manufacture prostheses for wounded veterans.
08:08But rising U.S. tariffs are making production more expensive, and the machines barely affordable.
08:15For the first time in his life, this Ukrainian soldier walks on his new leg.
08:25A U.S. company donated the machines that makes these prosthetics possible,
08:31but their work is becoming much more difficult.
08:34Tariffs are driving up costs.
08:36Will tariffs stand in the way of helping Ukraine's wounded?
08:46So this is the machine that we have developed for making prosthetic sockets.
08:52It is a 3D printer, the socket, the socket is what comes out of the machine.
09:00So then you would attach it to the puck to lock it in place.
09:04So there's your foot assembly pylon attached to the socket.
09:08So, you know, basically it's that attached to that.
09:14Tony wants to send 26 more of those machines to Ukraine, but here's the problem.
09:20The screw that you see here, the rails that they ride on, those are Japanese.
09:26The motors, which you see driving the rails, are from China.
09:32So basically everything on this machine is tariffed.
09:35Without tariffs, the machine costs 18,000 U.S. dollars.
09:40Tariffs could add a couple of thousands on top.
09:43We've already laid off 15 people in the last two months because of declining sales.
09:48We're already feeling it.
09:50We're already seeing it in the expense of our products.
09:52I mean, we're negotiating, we're trying to keep prices down as best we can,
09:55but there are just certain things we have no control over.
09:58Tony checks in with his supply chain director.
10:01Hi, Rich.
10:02Hey, Tony.
10:03How about you give me a rundown of where we are at tariffs today?
10:05It's stressful.
10:06Very stressful.
10:07It was at 145 or something.
10:11I am constantly looking at what the changes are with the tariffs and then from there trying
10:19to understand what the amount is going to be, how much we're going to have to absorb,
10:24how much we need to pass on our cuss herbs.
10:27The tariffs add extra costs to raw materials like aluminum as well as to the imported components.
10:35Yeah, it's just completely unrealistic for us to even consider all of our sourcing in the United States.
10:41All of these parts are coming in from all over the world.
10:43We would then have to redesign our machines.
10:45You're talking about a generation's worth of work.
10:47This is not a short-term thing.
10:50This will take many, many, many years for us to do.
10:53Despite the difficulties, Tony wants to keep giving.
10:57So far, four machines have already made it to Brovary, Ukraine.
11:01But that was before the tariffs hit.
11:04Now, U.S. staff are showing their Ukrainian partners how to use the equipment via video calls.
11:10Giving up is not an option.
11:12You have to deal with it.
11:14You have to show the people that are working for you that you are trying to manage as best you can.
11:19You've just got to stay the course, try to figure it out.
11:22You know, as these things change, try to adapt as best we can.
11:26He's one step closer to his goal of getting 30 prosthetic printers to Ukraine.
11:32His engineers could assemble this machine with parts that he bought before the tariffs hit.
11:37Now it's being prepared for shipping.
11:39But the uncertainty is still on Tony's mind.
11:42What will have to happen is there's going to have to be some type of consistency in the tariff situation,
11:51so that we all know the rules and that we can all act accordingly.
11:55Until there is some kind of certainty around tariffs, it's going to be chaotic.
12:00It's just the only way to explain it.
12:02It's just plain chaos.
12:04At least this one is good to go.
12:08Just some last-minute fine-tuning on the packaging before shipping.
12:13Destination Ukraine.
12:17The rule is simple.
12:23A strong currency makes products more expensive on global markets, and therefore less competitive.
12:30That's why a weak currency can be a real competitive advantage.
12:34The US dollar is currently strong.
12:37And this is becoming a problem for the US economy.
12:40President Trump now wants to weaken the dollar at any cost.
12:43How?
12:44Insights into Trump's currency strategy.
12:47There are two problems haunting the US government, and at their core sits the global role of the dollar.
12:56This is a story of revamping manufacturing and of reviving old ideas with a radical new twist called the Mar-a-Lago Accord.
13:03The proposed solutions offer a glimpse at US policy to come, but could end up breaking the global dominance of the dollar.
13:10Similar to industrial stories today, this story starts with cars.
13:18American cars in the 1980s.
13:21No secret, a lot of people believe American cars aren't filled as well as Japanese or European cars.
13:27But it wasn't just the build.
13:29It was also price.
13:32The United States was buying a lot more Japanese cars and German cars.
13:36And Japan and Germany were importing a lot less from the United States.
13:41And the Reagan administration was concerned about this.
13:43Cars produced in the United States were more expensive for foreign consumers driving down sales.
13:48US manufacturers were enjoying cheap steel imports, but selling their products overseas was difficult.
13:54One reason, the Americans argued, the dollar was overvalued.
13:58Pressure intensified for US manufacturing to be more competitive so that America could no longer be pushed around.
14:05So in September 1985, finance ministers of West Germany, France, the US, Britain and Japan met to strike a deal to change the course of manufacturing and the dollar.
14:16It was an agreement negotiated at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, which coincidentally Donald Trump bought about three years later, didn't own it at the time.
14:25The goal of the Plaza Accord was to devalue the dollar itself, something that plays out on the stage of foreign exchange markets.
14:36They are pretty weird marketplaces because they trade money for money, which means the price tag for one currency is always made out in another currency.
14:45And there are a couple of reasons why that price tag could be higher than it should be.
14:51If a lot of people want to buy products or services from the United States and need to buy dollars for it, the dollar price rises.
14:57But that's not all. Oil around the world is traded in dollars.
15:01Financial markets globally use it as a basis for many contracts.
15:06And in many places, people and businesses trust the dollar more than their own currency.
15:12What that does, it creates a lot of extra demand for dollars, which pushes up the price for dollars.
15:19What happened after Plaza was central banks themselves became market actors, right?
15:25They possess foreign currency reserves.
15:28And so you add, right, Germany and Japan essentially selling dollars in foreign exchange markets.
15:36And then the United States doing the opposite, buying German marks in Japanese yen.
15:41With a lot of sales of dollars at the same time, the market followed and pushed the dollar price lower.
15:47But the Plaza intervention wasn't a permanent fix.
15:50Especially since 2014, the dollar's value kept creeping up.
15:54Which leads to today, where trade imbalances are top of the news again.
15:59Donald Trump has spoken out against the dollar's value multiple times, citing especially the price difference between the dollar and the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan as disproportionate.
16:08The roll of the dollar is massive, accounting for example for half of global trade invoicing.
16:13And that's where the Mar-a-Lago Accord comes in.
16:16Referencing the Plaza Accord, it's named after Donald Trump's golf resort.
16:21It's an idea in this paper published by Stephen Mirren in November 2024.
16:26He's now Donald Trump's top economic advisor.
16:29As the Trump administration has been implementing some of its economic policies here in the first couple months of its term, some folks have been sort of pointing back to that paper and trying to really perhaps explain the administration's policies in the light of what was argued in this paper.
16:48In its first part, it suggests that the US pressure countries into helping it devalue the dollar with tariffs and that it's threatened to withdraw military support.
16:59If tariffs are a stick, Trump would budge on his tariff regime if other countries cooperate in currency.
17:05Threatening to pull the US defense umbrella to get cooperation on economic policy would be a major shift in foreign policy.
17:12Senior members of the US administration have already questioned whether the United States should provide military support around the globe for free.
17:20The dollar's value has dropped since the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency as his destruction of the international trading system ushered in uncertainty.
17:32It's mostly seen as a sign that investors are losing faith in the US, a first sign that Trump could be breaking the dollar's grip on the world.
17:41But there is a second concern in Stephen Mirren's playbook, government debt.
17:50To pay for expenditures like the military, education and health, governments all around the world take on debt.
17:56For example, the US issues bonds, debt contracts that are sold to people, banks and other investors.
18:04These creditors lend money to the government for, let's say, 10 years.
18:09They receive some interest payments and technically get their money back after the agreed time.
18:14The US government borrows about $2 trillion every year like this.
18:18But the interest payments the US government makes out to its creditors have jumped since 2021.
18:23The US central bank had raised interest rates to rein in inflation, pushing up borrowing costs for the government as well.
18:30The second leg of the Mar-a-Lago Accord was essentially this goal to reduce US debt service costs.
18:38The idea would be to force other countries to swap the US bonds they hold already for new bonds that last for 100 years and pay no or lower interest.
18:47And that's a slippery slope because it casts doubt on the creditworthiness of the US government.
18:53Yeah, this is such an unprecedented idea.
18:55This is, in my opinion, the most kind of fantastical part of this.
18:58I have a hard time imagining this actually happening.
19:01But frankly, I have a hard time imagining them even asking for this because I think it'd be kind of nuts.
19:08So far, these plans are not official policy.
19:12But they could lead to investors further losing trust in the dollar.
19:17Because it threatens the institutions that uphold the currency's role now.
19:23Some investors are already moving away from the dollar.
19:28In recent years, foreign countries intensified their purchases of gold.
19:33But with massive savings sloshing around the world, what else can serve as a storage value?
19:40I do think this potential for Europe to find the political will to potentially unite capital markets and to start to borrow in ways that would, again, create larger asset pools.
19:58Could really, you know, not that they could rival the dollar, right, but start to present a realistic alternative for diversification.
20:09And that's the problem.
20:18Trump's policies could in fact drive down the value of the dollar, not because of a negotiated deal, but because people don't want to do business with the US anymore.
20:27In that world, the US would have to bring out the big guns to get ahead on debt.
20:31But most people and countries don't want to be told which currency to use at gunpoint.
20:37And that's the risk of this plan to change global finance, that it's so radical it breaks the dollar's dominance in its wake.
20:50The world's leading currencies could soon be a thing of the past.
20:54Digital currencies are set to replace the US dollar and even gold as a safe haven.
20:59But digital currencies are volatile, can fluctuate greatly in value, and therefore also pose a risk.
21:06So, are digital currencies a gamble or a good alternative?
21:11For centuries, the world has relied on gold and various currencies for trade and storing value.
21:24But now Bitcoin is vying for reserve status.
21:27Can it replace gold or the dollar?
21:29That depends on whether it can do what gold and hard currency can do.
21:34In general, money can have three functions.
21:37This is a store of value, literally as a fungible asset that holds value that has been earned or accrued in a variety of ways.
21:46Money also functions as a unit of account.
21:49The ability to use an asset to measure the value of other assets and other things.
21:54And as a medium of exchange, which is critical, obviously, for commerce that we engage in on a daily basis.
22:03And what about gold?
22:05Bitcoin is often called digital gold.
22:08Limited in supply, tamper-proof, but easier to move and not controlled by any country.
22:15And if you look at every dimension of Bitcoin against gold, it is definitely a store of value asset that's more ready for the century we live in.
22:26It's digital.
22:27It can be transferred at very low cost.
22:29It's divisible in a way that gold does not.
22:32Gold is complex to divide in different parts.
22:35It's not just private investors turning to Bitcoin.
22:38Governments are already holding it in their reserves to protect their countries from economic turbulence.
22:44The largest Bitcoin reserves are held by the United States, with around 198,000 Bitcoins, followed by the UK and Bhutan.
22:53El Salvador, the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, holds about 6,200 Bitcoins.
23:01But what do these numbers mean for the future of Bitcoin as a global reserve?
23:06In the U.S., talks are being held about making Bitcoin a permanent part of the national currency reserves.
23:12The goal is to hold around 5% of all Bitcoins, roughly 1 million coins.
23:18But this plan still faces major obstacles.
23:21It's hard to imagine it replacing the dollar because, of course, Bitcoin at the moment is volatile and so behaves a little bit more like digital gold than a reserve currency.
23:35And as you can imagine, there's also geopolitical interest in retaining the dollar status as a global reserve currency.
23:43Here's a breakdown of global foreign exchange reserves.
23:47The U.S. dollar leads the pack with nearly 58%.
23:50Trailing far behind are the Euro at just under 20%, and the Yen and British Pound at under 6%.
23:56The remaining currencies account for nearly 12%.
24:02So far, Bitcoin plays virtually no role in this context.
24:06But the proponents of Bitcoin say that price fluctuations will decrease as more governments buy and hold it.
24:15The more value that is stored in Bitcoin, held in Bitcoin, but does increase the price stabilization a bit.
24:21But with increasing demand, the pressure on the market is also rising.
24:25You can't just turn around and buy, you know, $100 billion of Bitcoin.
24:30There's going to be demand pressure on all of that.
24:34Another drawback of using Bitcoin as a national currency reserve?
24:37The possibility of theft through hacking attacks.
24:40And regulation is still unclear in most countries.
24:44Yet Bitcoin is essentially the leading cryptocurrency.
24:47It's tried and true and independent of central bank decisions, which is exactly what makes it attractive to many investors.
24:53Bitcoin will increasingly be the most important digital asset in the crypto space.
24:59It will have different economic properties than the dollar, the Euro, the Yen, the Pound, the Yuan.
25:04And people will use it for different purposes.
25:06For example, one idea is like if you're trying to move value between two different countries.
25:13Whether Bitcoin will truly replace gold or the dollar remains to be seen.
25:17But one thing is clear.
25:18Central banks are starting to digitize their reserves.
25:22The central banks seem to be betting on cryptocurrencies as well.
25:34Either way, money makes the world go round.
25:37That's all for today.
25:39Tariffs are weighing on economies and luxury goods are apparently everywhere.
25:44Take care.
25:45And see you next time.
25:46Take care.
25:47And see you next time.
25:48Bye.
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