跟读练习: Something weird is happening in Indonesia… - 通过视频学习英语口语
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A few weeks ago, police raided a house in Jakarta.
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Inside, they found 74 kilos of gold bars and 26 million dollars in cash.
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Nice.
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The owner?
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The top anti -corruption prosecutor of Indonesia.
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The guy whose job is catching dirty money.
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Now, corruption stories come out of a lot of countries.
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Usually, nobody cares.
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But not this time.
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Because this raid landed in the middle of something much bigger.
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Indonesia's currency has crashed to its weakest level ever.
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The stock market is down 26%, one of the worst in Asia, and billions of dollars are leaving the country.
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From foreign funds and from Indonesians who don't trust their own system anymore.
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The government's answer is well, quite a surprise.
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They are locking the doors so the money can't get out.
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In this video, I'll show you what's really happening in Indonesia
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and why the people who know this country the best are the ones panicking the most.
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My name is Bertrand.
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I've been doing business in Asia for 26 years.
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I'm not guessing how things work here.
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I deal with them every week.
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That's why I created this channel to share my perspective from the inside.
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If that's useful to you, subscribe.
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For 20 years, Indonesia has been the silent overachiever of Asia.
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Growth around 5 % almost every single year with a regularity that most governments would kill for.
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And it did it without the usual emerging market roller coaster.
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No default, no IMF drama since the 90s.
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Just the same steady number year in year out.
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It's the fourth biggest population on earth, 280 million people.
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Most of them are young enough that the country's best years are still ahead of it.
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Adjust for purchasing power and Indonesia is already the seven largest economy in the world, bigger than France.
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Most people have no idea.
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And the country sits on 42 % of the world's nickel reserves the metal inside every EV battery.
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For decades, Indonesia did what poor countries always do.
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Dig the ore, ship it raw, watch someone else capture the profit.
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But in 2020, it stopped.
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The export of raw nickel ore got banned.
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You want Indonesian nickel?
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Then you build in Indonesia and you hire Indonesians to do it.
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Every consultant say this will scare investors away.
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Instead, billions flooded in.
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Funds trusted this country with their money because of the discipline.
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The 1998 crisis nearly killed Indonesia.
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Out of that trauma, the country wrote itself a rule.
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The budget deficit stays under 3 % of GDP.
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It's not a promise, it's a law.
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Every government respected it for 20 years, including through COVID.
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On paper, Indonesia is doing amazing.
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It has a huge domestic market, relatively low public debt, strategic resources and a young population.
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Its economy is not collapsing in the traditional sense.
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That is precisely what makes the current situation so interesting.
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The economic foundations still look strong but investors are becoming less confident in the institutions managing them.
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Since late 2024, the funds that spent 20 years buying the Indonesia story have been selling it.
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First in silence, now in the open.
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And the speed of that exit is the kind you normally only see when a country is about to break.
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In June, the rupiah crashed through 18 ,000 to the dollar, the weakest level in its entire history.
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Weaker than 1998, when the crisis brought down a dictatorship.
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So, the government made a crazy move.
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Parliament amended a financial law.
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On the surface, technical stuff.
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But buried inside it, won't close.
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Anyone who buys special bonds from Danantara, the state giant investment fund, receives legal immunity.
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Immunity from criminal prosecution, civil lawsuits or tax investigations.
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Think about who that offer attracts.
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If your money is clean, immunity is worth nothing to you.
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The market understood immediately and the rupee has started falling again the same week.
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The stock market tells the same story.
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Since Prabowo took office, the Jakarta index has lost more than a quarter of its value.
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In February, it went through a really bad crash.
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The trigger was a press release from MSCI, the company that decides which countries qualified as real investment markets.
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They basically threatened to reclassify Indonesia as a frontier market.
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Frontier?
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The same category as Kenya or Bangladesh.
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For the seventh largest economy on earth, that's tough.
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If that happens, every fund that tracks emerging market indexes has to sell Indonesia, because their own rules force them to.
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Then Moody's join in with a negative credit outlook, one step before a downgrade.
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Foreign investors panicked and have pulled about $8 .9 billion out of Indonesian assets.
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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.
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Indonesians themselves have moved.
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28 .2 billion out of their own country, three times more than the foreigners.
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The people with the best information about Indonesia are the ones running the fastest.
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Add it all up and the country's balance of payments, which was sitting on a comfortable surplus two years ago,
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has flipped to a 9 billion dollars deficit.
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The central bank is burning reserves to slow the fall, 10 billion dollars gone in the first half of this year alone.
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It's very weird because it looks like a reaction to a recession.
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But officially, Indonesia is still growing above 5%, one of the best numbers of any major economy.
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So either the smartest money in Asia has lost its mind, or it knows something about that 5 % that you don't.
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Let me explain.
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Indonesia is a giant commodity exporter.
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Coal, pine oil, and of course nickel.
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When world prices for those swing, the economy should swing with them.
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That's how it works everywhere.
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Yet Indonesia's official growth prints 5 % every quarter.
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Boom years, crisis years, oil shock, trade war, always 5%.
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An economy that never has a bad quarter is strange.
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At some point, you stop admiring it and start checking what's wrong.
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Local economists did exactly that.
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Last year, a group of them requested a private meeting with the finance ministry to ask how exactly the numbers were being produced.
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Then came the first quarter of this year.
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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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本课的词汇与口语要点
这节口语课以视频“Something weird is happening in Indonesia…”为素材。 这段视频共有 192 个句子、2418 个单词可供跟读。 讲话部分时长为 15:18。 说话人语速自然，每分钟约 158 个词，接近日常对话。 只有 81% 的单词属于英语最常用的 3,000 词，词汇难度较高。
视频中的重点词汇
视频中 15 个值得学习的单词，附发音和释义：
| 单词 | 发音 | 释义 |
|---|---|---|
| currency 名词 | /ˈkʌɹ.ən.si/ | 貨幣 /货币 |
| deficit 名词 | /ˈdɛfəsɪt/ | 赤字, 亏损 |
| investor 名词 | /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/ | 投資者 /投资者, 投資家 /投资家 |
| nickel 名词 | /ˈnɪk.əl/ | 鎳 /镍 |
| corruption 名词 | /kəˈɹʌpʃən/ | 腐敗 /腐败 |
| export 名词 | /ˈɛks.pɔɹt/ | 出口, 輸出 /输出 |
| immunity 名词 | /ɪˈmjuːnəti/ | 免疫, 免疫力 |
| emerge 动词 | /ɪˈmɝd͡ʒ/ | 出現 /出现 |
| commodity 名词 | /kəˈmɑdəti/ | 商品, 貨物 /货物 |
| meal 名词 | /ˈmiːl/ | 餐, 飯 /饭 |
| shock 名词 | /ʃɔk/ | 衝擊 /冲击 |
| exit 名词 | /ˈɛɡzət/ | 離開 /离开, 退場 /退场 |
| swing 动词 | /ˈswɪŋ/ | 擺動 /摆动, 搖擺 /摇摆 |
| seventh 形容词 | /ˈsɛvənθ/ | 第七 |
| discipline 名词 | /ˈdɪsəplɪn/ | 紀律 /纪律 |
视频中出现的短语动词
| 单词 | 释义 |
|---|---|
| figure out 动词 | 弄清楚 |
| go through 动词 | 通過 /通过 |
| sell off 动词 | 賣掉 /卖掉, 賤賣 /贱卖 |
| take out 动词 | 取出 |
值得反复跟读的句子
视频中简短而完整的句子，可以直接用在日常对话里：
- I'm not guessing how things work here.
- If that's useful to you, subscribe.
- Your supplier isn't being difficult.
视频中的语法
说话人最常用的结构，并附上视频中的原话：
| 结构 | 视频中的用法 |
|---|---|
| 现在完成进行时 have/has been + -ing — 以前开始、现在仍在继续的动作 | I've been doing · have been selling · has been closing |
| 条件句 if + 从句，will/would + 动词 — 条件及其结果 | If it does that, Indonesia will stop · If the doors keep multiplying, you'll know |
| 现在完成时 have/has + 过去分词 — 过去发生但与现在仍有关联的事 | has crashed · has been · has started |
| 被动语态 be + 过去分词 — 强调发生了什么，而不是谁做的 | being produced · was detained · is now locked |
需要注意的发音
说话人用了 21 次缩略和弱读形式，例如 don't, can't, you're。请按听到的简短形式来说。
- “th” 音: seventh /ˈsɛvənθ/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/
- “sh” 和 “zh” 音: corruption /kəˈɹʌpʃən/, shock /ʃɔk/, shortly /ˈʃɔɹtli/, exposure /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/, capture /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/
- 长单词——注意重音位置: immunity /ɪˈmjuːnəti/, commodity /kəˈmɑdəti/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, credibility /kɹɛd.əˈbɪ.ɫɪ.ti/, temporary /ˈtɛmp(əˌɹ)ɛɹi/
中文母语者容易读错的音：
- /v/ — 不要读成 /w/，上齿轻触下唇: investor /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/, seventh /ˈsɛvənθ/, administrative /ədˈmɪn.ɪ.stɹə.tɪv/, recover /ɹɪˈkʌvɚ/, preserve /pɹəˈzɝv/
- 词尾辅音 — 要读清楚，后面不要加元音: deficit /ˈdɛfəsɪt/, export /ˈɛks.pɔɹt/, emerge /ɪˈmɝd͡ʒ/, shock /ʃɔk/, exit /ˈɛɡzət/
- /r/ 和 /l/ 的区别: credibility /kɹɛd.əˈbɪ.ɫɪ.ti/, shortly /ˈʃɔɹtli/, electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, precisely /pɹɪˈsaɪs.li/, clarity /ˈklæɹ.ɪ.ti/
如何用这段视频练习
- 先完整听一遍视频，不要开口，记下不认识的单词。
- 先用 0.75 倍速逐句跟读，熟练之后再回到正常速度。
- 录下自己的声音并与原声对比，特别注意 currency, deficit, investor 这类单词。
什么是跟读法？
跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。