Indonesia's Jokowi Legacy Bonds and the $3 Billion Question Nobody Asked

why Jakarta felt different from Saigon

I moved from Ho Chi Minh City to Jakarta in March 2025 for a job at GoTo Group, Indonesia's largest tech company. The two cities share alot: chaotic traffic, incredible street food, humid air that hits you like a wall when you step outside the airport. The financial cultures are fully different. In Vietnam, everyone talks about gold prices an the dollar exchange rate because the dong is not fully convertible and capital controls are strict. In Indonesia, the rupiah is also managed, but the financial system feels more open an more dollarized. Banks advertise dual-currency accounts. Real estate listings quote prices in both rupiah and dollars. My GoTo salary was denominated in rupiah at 42 million per month, approximately $2,560 at the March 2025 exchange rate of 16,400 rupiah per dollar. Adequate for a single person in South Jakarta. Not enough to build wealth in a currency that loses 4 to 5 percent of its dollar value annually.

the sovereign wealth fund that worried me

Indonesia launched INA, the Indonesia Investment Authority, in 2021 with an initial capitalization of $3 billion. The fund was supposed to be Indonesia's answer to Singapore's Temasek, a sovereign wealth fund that would invest in strategic infrastructure and generate returns for the nation. By 2026, INA had grown to approximately $9 billion in committed capital, but the actual deployed capital was only about $4.2 billion. The gap between committed and deployed capital bothered me. More concerning was the source of the capital. Approximately $3 billion came from the government budget, which meant it was borrowed money since Indonesia runs a fiscal deficit. The government was issuing bonds at 6.5 to 7 percent to fund a sovereign wealth fund that was targeting returns of 8 to 10 percent. The spread was too thin. If the fund earned 9 percent and the government dropped 7 percent to fund it, the net return to the Indonesian people was 2 percent before management fees and overhead. This was not a wealth creation vehicle. It was an accounting exercise with a fancy name.

my refinance attempt in Jakarta

In January 2026, I tried to refinance the mortgage on a slight apartment I owned in District 7, Ho Chi Minh City. The apartment was valued at approximately 3.2 billion dong, about $130,000. I owed about 1.8 billion dong on a Vietnamese bank loan at 9.2 percent interest. I wanted to refinance to a lower rate because the State Bank of Vietnam had been cutting rates. The problem was that I was now a resident of Indonesia, not Vietnam, and the bank required proof of Vietnamese income to approve the application. My GoTo salary was dropped in rupiah to an Indonesian bank account. The Vietnamese bank, Techcombank, wouldnt accept Indonesian income documents. I was stuck with a 9.2 percent mortgage on a property in a country where I nah longer lived, earning income in a currency that had nothing to do with either the property or the loan. The cross-border complexity was maddening. I eventually got a co-borrower, my sister who still lived in Ho Chi Minh City, to apply for the fresh loan jointly. It was approved at 7.8 percent in May 2026. The savings were about 2.8 million dong per month, approximately $115. Not life-changing. Still worth doin.

commodity dependence hiding in plain sight

Indonesia is the world's largest exporter of nickel, thermal coal, and palm oil. These three commodities account for approximately 25 percent of export earnings. When commodity prices are high, the government collects more revenue, the trade surplus widens, an the rupiah strengthens. When prices fall, everythin reverses. In 2025, nickel prices dropped from $18,000 per metric ton in January to $14,500 by December, a 19 percent decline driven by oversupply from fresh Indonesian smelters. Thermal coal was range-bound round $95 per ton, down from the 2022 peak of $420. Palm oil prices had softened to $850 per ton from over $1,300 in 2022. The commodity supercycle that had boosted Indonesian exports from 2020 to 2023 was plainly over. Government revenue from the mining sector fell 14 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. The rupiah weakened from 15,800 to 16,600 per dollar over the same period. I had zeroed in on this relationship early an it shaped every financial decision I made in Jakarta.

the debt settlement comparison that haunts me

A coworker at GoTo, an Indonesian woman named Sari, told me about her brother who had gone through debt settlement after his restaurant business failed during COVID. He owed 680 million rupiah, about $41,000, across four credit cards and two personal loans. The banks were charging 18 to 24 percent annual interest. He negotiated settlements of 40 to 60 cents on the rupiah with each creditor, paying a total of about 340 million rupiah to clear 680 million in obligations. The debt settlement wrecked his borrowing record for five years, but he was debt-free an rebuilding. Sari said her brother's experience was routine in Indonesia, where personal insolvency laws are weak and banks prefer partial recovery to total default. I reckoned about this story alot. In the United States, this process is a regulated industry with specific procedures and consumer protections. In Indonesia, its a chaotic negotiation between a desperate borrower and a bank that has limited legal recourse. The outcome is frequently better for the borrower than in the US, where bankruptcy can follow you for a decade. Indonesia's financial system has gaps. Sometimes those gaps benefit ordinary people.

the ETF I bought and immediately regretted

In April 2026, I snagged $5,000 of the iShares MSCI Indonesia ETF, ticker EIDO, at $25.40 per share. The fund held a basket of large Indonesian companies: Bank Central Asia, Astra International, Telkom Indonesia, and about 70 others. The price-to-earnings ratio was 14, reasonable for an emerging market. The dividend yield was 2.8 percent. I snagged it cuz I believed in Indonesia's long-term domestic consumption story. 275 million people with a rising middle class and increasing internet penetration. Within six weeks, EIDO dropped to $23.80, a 6.3 percent decline, as commodity prices weakened further and the rupiah slid. I hadn't done anything wrong in my analysis. The timing was just terrible. I was buying into a cyclical downturn in the commodity-dependent export sector that was dragging the whole market down. I held the position. The cost was modest. The lesson was useful. ETFs make diversification easy. They don't make timing easy. Nothing does.

the credit score I left behind in Vietnam

When I moved to Indonesia, my Vietnamese credit score was 786, which is excellent by Vietnamese standards. I had built it over seven years of on-time credit card payments, a mortgage, an a personal loan that I dropped off early. In Indonesia, I was starting from scratch again. I applied for a Bank Central Asia credit card in April 2025 and was approved with a modest limit of 15 million rupiah, about $900. I used it for groceries an dining an dropped the balance in full every month. By July 2026, my Indonesian credit score, maintained by the Indonesian Financial Services Authority's SLIK system, was developing but still thin. I had no loan history in Indonesia, only credit card payments. It would take two to three years to build a credit profile comparable to what I had in Vietnam. This is the invisible cost of international mobility. Every time you cross a border, your financial identity resets. The American credit rating system at least has some cross-border awareness thru credit bureaus like Experian that operate internationally. In Southeast Asia, each country's credit system is an island. Your financial reputation in Ho Chi Minh City means nothing in Jakarta. You start over. Again and again.

why I'm still optimistic

Despite the commodity headwinds, the fiscal pressure on INA, and the currency depreciation, I believe Indonesia is one of the best long-term investment stories in emerging markets. The population is young, the democratic institutions are maturing after two decades since the Suharto era, an the digital economy is growing at 20 percent per year. GoTo itself processes more transactions than several Southeast Asian banking groups combined. The problems I've described, commodity dependence, weak credit infrastructure, fiscal challenges, these are problems of a country that is developing fast and bumping up against the limitations of its institutions. That's different from the problems of a country that is stagnating or declining. Indonesia is building. The building is messy and expensive an sometimes I wonder if I'm just rationalizing my decision to move here. Mayb I am. The street food is incredible either way.