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40,000 Factories At Risk Of Closing In Pakistan’s Commercial Capital Amid Fuel Crisis
40,000 Factories At Risk Of Closing In Pakistan’s Commercial Capital Amid Fuel Crisis
Pakistan faces potential economic collapse as inflation jumps and widespread civil unrest could be nearing. The latest sign the South Asian country is spiraling into the abyss is rising electricity costs that threaten to close tens of thousands of businesses.
Bloomberg reports that as many as 40,000 factories in Karachi, the country’s commercial capital, are being slapped with high power costs that make operating near impossible.
Rising power costs are so severe that nine business groups in Karachi told the government that an immediate plan needs to be formulated to lower power costs or face economic disaster.
Any shuttering of factories and mass layoffs could trigger social unrest in the commercial capital, home to more than 16 million people.
Discontent among businesses and households is already soaring with an official inflation rate of over 13.37% (double the official CPI to get a more accurate picture of true price inflation), the 2nd fastest-rising rate in Asia.
On top of high power costs, Karachi’s power utility — K-Electric Ltd. — warned customers of widespread power cuts for the first time in over a decade if power generation continues to struggle because of high fuel costs and supply shortages.
“These current conditions are severely hindering KE’s ability to procure fuel, causing a permanent curtailment of power generation” that translates to as much as 10 hours of planned blackouts for some parts of the city, said Sadia Dada, a spokesperson for K-Electric.
Pakistan is also a nuclear power — political elites may stoke a conflict with neighboring India to distract public anger from domestic financial pain.
China Orders Owners Of Closed Factories To Boost Electricity Usage, Pretend Economy Is Back To Normal
China Orders Owners Of Closed Factories To Boost Electricity Usage, Pretend Economy Is Back To Normal
While the media is doing its best to pin the upcoming coronavirus epidemic in the US on a botched response by the Trump administration, with TrumpVirus already starting to trend across social media, the truth is that no matter how bad Trump’s reaction to the pandemic is, it is rocket science compared to the botched, catastrophic actions undertaken by China, which also happens to be source of the deadliest global pandemic in decades.
Here is a quick recap of what has happened so far in China:
- The deadly Covid-19, i.e., SARS-like coronavirus, originated as a byproduct of banned “gain of function” genetic engineering conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Contrary to the conventionally accepted official narrative, it then spread, presumably by accident, to a nearby food market, where it infected patient zero and the rest is history (in the meantime, anyone who reported that the virus was sourced at the Wuhan Level-4 biolab was ostracized, shunned, threatened, arrested or simply ordered to retract their statement or research).
- In the early days of the pandemic, in hopes of avoiding a panic, Beijing actively rounded up any doctors who tried to sound the alarm on the danger that the coronavirus posed. Only three weeks later, around Jan 20, did China start reporting official numbers associated with the disease.
- Just days after it “broke the seal” on the information blackout, Beijing quarantined over 60 million people in major Chinese cities, in hopes of avoiding a further panic, and preventing further spread of the virus. Ultimately, over 700 million people – half of China’s population – was put on some form of lock down. Panic had by now spread across the mainland, as virtually nobody in China had any idea what the facts were aside from the government’s propaganda.
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