Shadowing Practice: Something weird is happening in Indonesia… - Learn English Speaking with Video

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A few weeks ago, police raided a house in Jakarta.

Inside, they found 74 kilos of gold bars and 26 million dollars in cash.

Nice.

The owner?

The top anti -corruption prosecutor of Indonesia.

The guy whose job is catching dirty money.

Now, corruption stories come out of a lot of countries.

Usually, nobody cares.

But not this time.

Because this raid landed in the middle of something much bigger.

Indonesia's currency has crashed to its weakest level ever.

The stock market is down 26%, one of the worst in Asia, and billions of dollars are leaving the country.

From foreign funds and from Indonesians who don't trust their own system anymore.

The government's answer is well, quite a surprise.

They are locking the doors so the money can't get out.

In this video, I'll show you what's really happening in Indonesia

and why the people who know this country the best are the ones panicking the most.

My name is Bertrand.

I've been doing business in Asia for 26 years.

I'm not guessing how things work here.

I deal with them every week.

That's why I created this channel to share my perspective from the inside.

If that's useful to you, subscribe.

For 20 years, Indonesia has been the silent overachiever of Asia.

Growth around 5 % almost every single year with a regularity that most governments would kill for.

And it did it without the usual emerging market roller coaster.

No default, no IMF drama since the 90s.

Just the same steady number year in year out.

It's the fourth biggest population on earth, 280 million people.

Most of them are young enough that the country's best years are still ahead of it.

Adjust for purchasing power and Indonesia is already the seven largest economy in the world, bigger than France.

Most people have no idea.

And the country sits on 42 % of the world's nickel reserves the metal inside every EV battery.

For decades, Indonesia did what poor countries always do.

Dig the ore, ship it raw, watch someone else capture the profit.

But in 2020, it stopped.

The export of raw nickel ore got banned.

You want Indonesian nickel?

Then you build in Indonesia and you hire Indonesians to do it.

Every consultant say this will scare investors away.

Instead, billions flooded in.

Funds trusted this country with their money because of the discipline.

The 1998 crisis nearly killed Indonesia.

Out of that trauma, the country wrote itself a rule.

The budget deficit stays under 3 % of GDP.

It's not a promise, it's a law.

Every government respected it for 20 years, including through COVID.

On paper, Indonesia is doing amazing.

It has a huge domestic market, relatively low public debt, strategic resources and a young population.

Its economy is not collapsing in the traditional sense.

That is precisely what makes the current situation so interesting.

The economic foundations still look strong but investors are becoming less confident in the institutions managing them.

Since late 2024, the funds that spent 20 years buying the Indonesia story have been selling it.

First in silence, now in the open.

And the speed of that exit is the kind you normally only see when a country is about to break.

In June, the rupiah crashed through 18 ,000 to the dollar, the weakest level in its entire history.

Weaker than 1998, when the crisis brought down a dictatorship.

So, the government made a crazy move.

Parliament amended a financial law.

On the surface, technical stuff.

But buried inside it, won't close.

Anyone who buys special bonds from Danantara, the state giant investment fund, receives legal immunity.

Immunity from criminal prosecution, civil lawsuits or tax investigations.

Think about who that offer attracts.

If your money is clean, immunity is worth nothing to you.

The market understood immediately and the rupee has started falling again the same week.

The stock market tells the same story.

Since Prabowo took office, the Jakarta index has lost more than a quarter of its value.

In February, it went through a really bad crash.

The trigger was a press release from MSCI, the company that decides which countries qualified as real investment markets.

They basically threatened to reclassify Indonesia as a frontier market.

Frontier?

The same category as Kenya or Bangladesh.

For the seventh largest economy on earth, that's tough.

If that happens, every fund that tracks emerging market indexes has to sell Indonesia, because their own rules force them to.

Then Moody's join in with a negative credit outlook, one step before a downgrade.

Foreign investors panicked and have pulled about $8 .9 billion out of Indonesian assets.

Some of this movement might just be investors reducing exposure to emerging markets, but domestic capital appears to be living on an even larger scale.

Indonesians themselves have moved.

28 .2 billion out of their own country, three times more than the foreigners.

The people with the best information about Indonesia are the ones running the fastest.

Add it all up and the country's balance of payments, which was sitting on a comfortable surplus two years ago,

has flipped to a 9 billion dollars deficit.

The central bank is burning reserves to slow the fall, 10 billion dollars gone in the first half of this year alone.

It's very weird because it looks like a reaction to a recession.

But officially, Indonesia is still growing above 5%, one of the best numbers of any major economy.

So either the smartest money in Asia has lost its mind, or it knows something about that 5 % that you don't.

Let me explain.

Indonesia is a giant commodity exporter.

Coal, pine oil, and of course nickel.

When world prices for those swing, the economy should swing with them.

That's how it works everywhere.

Yet Indonesia's official growth prints 5 % every quarter.

Boom years, crisis years, oil shock, trade war, always 5%.

An economy that never has a bad quarter is strange.

At some point, you stop admiring it and start checking what's wrong.

Local economists did exactly that.

Last year, a group of them requested a private meeting with the finance ministry to ask how exactly the numbers were being produced.

Then came the first quarter of this year.

100

The government announced 5 .6 % gross, a 3 -year high, right in the middle of a currency collapse.

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Dig into that release and you find that a big chunk of the gross comes from unsold goods piling up in warehouses.

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Stuff nobody bought yet but counted as gross in the official math.

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That's not really a boom, it's more good PR.

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You also find manufacturing supposedly booming, while electricity use fell over the same period.

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Factories that produce more while consuming less power.

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That would be a world first.

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And you don't need the statistics degree to feel that something is off.

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Just ask the Indonesian middle class or what's left of it.

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In 2019, 57 million Indonesians qualified as middle class.

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Today, fewer than 47 million do.

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And no, they didn't get rich and move up.

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They fell down into what the statistics office politely called the aspiring middle class.

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Not poor, just one band mount away from it.

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That group now counts 142 million people.

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More than half the country lives just below the middle class line.

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How does that happen in a country that grows 5 % a year?

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Nobody can prove these numbers are fake.

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And that's not the point.

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They might not even be.

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And yes, I know the stock market has recovered a bit since the fall.

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But the point is that the people managing billions have stopped believing in the figures.

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And once markets stop believing in your data, they price you like a country with something to hide,

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especially when they look at who's holding the will.

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Prabowo came to power promising 8 % growth.

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His signature project is a giant free meal program for 80 million school children and pregnant women.

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The single program now eats around 10 % of the entire state budget.

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The idea itself is not irrational.

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Better childhood nutrition can improve health and long -term productivity, and Indonesia still faces serious problems with malnutrition.

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The concern is the scale and speed of the rollout.

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A useful social program can still become a fiscal and administrative risk

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if the government expends it faster than it can supervise or finance it.

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Then, war broke out in Iran oil jumped above $90.

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Indonesia imports most of its oil and subsidizes fuel at the pump.

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So, they watched both bills explode at once.

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Remember the sacred 3 % deficit rule from earlier?

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The finance ministry ran the numbers.

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At these oil prices, the deficit blows through it.

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A disciplined government would cut something.

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For over a year, Prabowo refused to touch any of it.

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Instead, the central bank started printing money to buy government debt.

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Shortly after Prabowo installed his nephew as its deputy governor, the country's billionaires were strong -armed into buying so -called Patriot Bonds.

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They fired the respected finance ministry who built Indonesia's credibility over a decade.

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And the corruption, you already know about the gold bars.

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What you don't know is where the latest scandal landed, inside the free meals program itself.

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In June, the head of the agency running it was detained for allegedly selling procurement rights to supply kitchens.

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Faced with that, the government has two options, rebuild trust or stop the money from leaving.

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Indonesia picked the second one.

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Since early 2025, Indonesia has been closing its financial doors one by one.

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Watch the sequence.

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Door number one, the exporters.

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If you export commodities from Indonesia, the dollars you earn no longer belong entirely to you.

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You must park them in state -controlled banks for a minimum

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of one year with strict limits on what you can take out.

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The government's logic is simple.

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That's 80 billion dollars in foreign currency it gets to keep inside the country.

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Door number 2.

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Everyone else.

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Nine months ago, an Indonesian business could buy up to 100 ,000 dollars without providing paperwork.

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Today, that ceiling is 10 ,000, a 90 % cut.

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Door number three, and this one shocked even people who thought they had seen everything.

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In May, Prabowo created a new state agency called DSI.

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Its job is simple, become the mandatory middleman for Indonesia's commodity exports.

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If you produce coal, time oil or certain nickel products in Indonesia, you can no longer sell them to the world yourself.

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You sell them to the state and the state sells it for you.

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Of course, they touch the dollars first.

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Officially, it's about fighting tax avoidance.

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In practice, the state just took control of the country's biggest sources of foreign currency in the middle of a currency crisis.

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You do the math.

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Even the rating agencies can't figure out how this agency works.

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Moody's cited the lack of clarity around DSI as one of its main reasons for keeping Indonesia on negative watch.

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Now, bring this down to your level.

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Say you source from Indonesia or you're eyeing it as your China alternative.

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Your supplier's cash is now locked in a state bank.

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Its costs move with a currency that lost 14 % in 18 months.

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None of that shows up in the GDP numbers.

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So where does it show up?

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In the payments.

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At Statress, that's the part we see firsthand and there's a pattern.

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When a country starts trapping money, the first people to react are the local suppliers.

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They start asking to be paid into accounts in Singapore or Hong Kong instead of locally.

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They push for bigger deposits up front.

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Your supplier isn't being difficult.

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He's protecting himself from his own banking system.

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So, if your Indonesian partners suddenly change how they want to get paid, that's the earliest warning about the country.

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Last week, Parliament just approved the creation of an international financial centre.

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He will probably be in Bali and is designed to compete with Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai.

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The offer is a 100 % corporate tax reduction.

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Golden visa holders who live there won't even count as Indonesian tax residents.

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They'll have special courts.

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The law went from first debate to final approval in under three weeks.

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Indonesia is offering the world 0 % tax in a country where exporters can't touch their own dollars.

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They're treating a trust problem the wrong way.

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At this point, it would be easy to write Indonesia off.

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That would also be a mistake.

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None of the problems we have discussed erases the country's qualities, and some investors believe the sell -off is exaggerated.

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In July, while everyone was busy writing obituaries, the Jakarta index climbed more than 10%.

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Alan Gray, an investment found known for buying exactly what everyone hates, just made its first

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Indonesian investment ever and foreign direct investment hit a record in the second quarter, up 27 % in a year.

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Even the rating agencies disagree with each other.

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While Moody's wave a red flag, S &P just reconfirm Indonesia's investment grade with a stable outlook.

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So, which side is right?

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The buyers or the sellers?

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Maybe both, actually.

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They're just not making the same bet.

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The buyers are betting that the assets are too cheap for a country this size.

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The settlers are betting that the rules will keep changing under their feet.

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Now, everybody is looking at the next move the government will pull out.

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There is still a credible positive scenario.

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The government could clarify DSI's mandate, preserve the independence of Bank Indonesia, keep the budget deficit within the believable past,

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and make the foreign currency rules more predictable.

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If it does that, Indonesia will stop damaging its credibility.

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Moody's has given itself 6 to 12 months to decide whether Indonesia keeps its investment great.

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But that's not the real emergency.

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Indonesia took drastic measures in the last few months, each one bigger than the last, each one buying less time.

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Argentina spent decades on that treadmill, so did Venezuela.

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Indonesia is not there today.

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But once temporary capital controls become permanent, removing them becomes politically and financially difficult.

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Very few countries have stepped off it voluntarily.

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Because the moment you lose in the control, the money you trap runs for the exit.

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And you're back to square one with less trust than before.

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So forget the gross number for a few months.

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Over the next year, watch one thing.

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The doors.

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If Jakarta starts reopening them, this becomes a rough patch in a great story.

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If the doors keep multiplying, you'll know which way this is going long before any official admits it.

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If this video helped you see Asia more clearly, subscribe.

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And if you do business with Indonesia or you're watching this from Jakarta and the picture on the ground looks different, tell me in the comments.

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I'll read them all.

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See you in the next video.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Something weird is happening in Indonesia…”. This video has 192 sentences and 2418 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:18. The speaker talks at a natural 158 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
currency noun	/ˈkʌɹ.ən.si/	Money or other items used to facilitate transactions.
deficit noun	/ˈdɛfəsɪt/	Deficiency in amount or quality; a falling short; lack.
investor noun	/ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/	A person who invests money in order to make a profit.
nickel noun	/ˈnɪk.əl/	A silvery elemental metal with an atomic number of 28 and symbol Ni.
corruption noun	/kəˈɹʌpʃən/	The act of corrupting or of impairing integrity, virtue, or moral principle; the state of being corrupted or debased; loss of purity or integrity.
boom verb	/bum/	To make a loud, hollow, resonant sound.
export noun	/ˈɛks.pɔɹt/	Something that is exported.
immunity noun	/ɪˈmjuːnəti/	Protective resistance against disease.
emerge verb	/ɪˈmɝd͡ʒ/	To come into view.
commodity noun	/kəˈmɑdəti/	Anything movable (a good) that is bought and sold.
meal noun	/ˈmiːl/	Food that is prepared and eaten, usually at a specific time, and usually in a comparatively large quantity.
shock noun	/ʃɔk/	A sudden, heavy impact.
exit noun	/ˈɛɡzət/	An act of going out or going away, or leaving; a departure.
swing verb	/ˈswɪŋ/	To rotate about an off-centre fixed point.
seventh adjective	/ˈsɛvənθ/	The ordinal form of the number seven.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
blow through verb	To expend or waste rapidly.
bring down verb	To make (a ruler or government) lose their position of power.
fall over verb	To fall from an upright or standing position to a horizontal or prone position.
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
get out verb	To leave or escape.
go through verb	To travel from one end of something to the other.
move up verb	To promote, put onto a higher level.
pull out verb	To withdraw; especially of military forces; to retreat.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

I'm not guessing how things work here.
If that's useful to you, subscribe.
Your supplier isn't being difficult.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	I've been doing · have been selling · has been closing
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If it does that, Indonesia will stop · If the doors keep multiplying, you'll know
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has crashed · has been · has started
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	being produced · was detained · is now locked

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 21 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, can't, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: seventh /ˈsɛvənθ/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: corruption /kəˈɹʌpʃən/, shock /ʃɔk/, shortly /ˈʃɔɹtli/, exposure /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/, capture /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/
Long words — get the stress right: immunity /ɪˈmjuːnəti/, commodity /kəˈmɑdəti/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, credibility /kɹɛd.əˈbɪ.ɫɪ.ti/, temporary /ˈtɛmp(əˌɹ)ɛɹi/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like currency, deficit, investor.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Something weird is happening in Indonesia… - Learn English Speaking with Video

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