Accountability and reparations; Virus origins; More propaganda attacks on Pompeo; BRI debt relief

Reminder: The PRC is off for the official Labor Day 五一 holiday from May 1-5. That means that most likely little will be happening between Thursday afternoon and next Wednesday, so the newsletter will be taking Monday off, barring something big going on. I will still hold the regular open thread on Friday.

We all need a vacation, especially after White House official Larry Kudlow had to deny that the US was considering making China pay for the pandemic by cancelling some of its US Treasury holdings.

The fact that people would even consider that is lunacy. Destroying the US treasury market and crashing the global financial system on top of the pandemic would be a problem.

You might be able to dismiss the talk as bad reporting (for the record I do not think it is) if President Trump himself had not responded to a Reuters question Wednesday by not denying the idea of “debt write-offs”:

Asked whether he was considering the use of tariffs or even debt write-offs for China, Trump would not off…