TR EMERITUS

I ran into a British Born Chinese girl at an event organized by my sister tonight. The conversation inevitably turned to the topic of growing up between East and West. Both of us admitted to being Chinese illiterate and she talked about how everyone in Hong Kong called her a Banana (Yellow on the outside but white on the inside), which was a moniker my mother takes pride in when describing us. Where we differed was in attitude. She expressed frustration that people in the Chinese speaking world couldn’t accept that someone who looked Chinese wouldn’t speak Chinese. She said, “Can’t they understand that you could have been adopted by a White Family and therefore wouldn’t know Chinese. I explained to her that while Singapore is predominantly English speaking and I am most comfortable in the English language (and admittedly not comfortable in Chinese), there are situations where I need to use Chinese because the people, I deal with a more likely to reveal things to me in Chinese than they would be in English. I do get where a lot of Chinese kids who are born in the West come from. Why should they speak Chinese when they identify as American, British or wherever they were born. Chinese was at best a language that they spoke to old folks and only when forced to. As far as these guys are concerned, their entire life is going to be in a Western environment and there’s no earthly reason for them to look at the Chinese language. The reason why I get this, is simple. I grew up in a similar situation. I only maintained enough Cantonese to order food in the take away (the quality of food is inevitably better when you order in Chinese) but other than that, there was no reason for me to use a Chinese language. However, I believed and I still believed that the future would inevitably be outside the Western world and so I returned to Singapore. It turned out that my affinity would be the other Asian Giant as well as the Arabian Gulf and so instead of being in more Mandarin speaking situations, I found more value in picking up a phrase or two of Hindi from Bollywood movies as well as the odd Arabic phrase here and there. Still, I understand that I will be in situations where I have to deal with people that will only respond in Chinese. Like it or not, China is a huge market with an increasingly well to do class of consumers. Many of the “good ones” will learn English but their main language will be Chinese and to reach them, you must have some knowledge of Chinese. Then, 2016 happened. The Americans voted for Trump and his brand of self-serving nationalism and the British decided that they needed to protect themselves from people who do work and voted to leave the EU. The problem was both sets of nationalists had no plan to get things done. The “strength” they promised turned out to be nothing more than chest thumping. You’re talking about people who love to provoke fights but when the other guy says “boo” they suddenly discover the ability to fly. The best tell tale sign of how well Brexit has turned out can be seen in this sign in Margate with Nigel Farage, the genius who championed Brexit: The fact that someone like Farage can sell a bad idea so successfully by appealing to the worst in people, should be a sign that depending on a single world for survival is plain stupid. This is not to say that the BRICS countries are paradise. They also have plenty of issues. However, the Western world has shown that it can change for the worse and if you don’t fit into the mainstream, you can find yourself in a sticky situation. I remember being a supermarket promoter at an NTUC and having to communicate in Chinese to the heart landers. It was really tough for me to do it but I kept reminding myself that I better get used to operating in Chinese because Trump was President of the USA and the British had allowed nationalism to triumph over economic pragmatism. This is not to say that English will be replaced as the world language anytime soon or that the English-speaking world will collapse. However, one should always be prepared to operate in a different environment than the one grew up in. The world is constantly changing and if you are only able to work in one type of environment, you’re begging to made extinct.   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able to meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →

Many Singapore citizens look at the election of the President as an office to keep a check on the government and to protect the reserves. I do not share their enthusiasm. Right from the start, when the first President was elected in 1991 under the revised constitution, I looked at the office as being unnecessary, wasteful and confusing. I do not believe that the President can protect the national reserves. It is too complicated. The first President, Ong Teng Cheong, said being in office for several years, that he does not know what are the official reserves. This does not mean that President Ong is "stupid". It meant that the whole concept is "stupid". There is a need to ensure that the government spends the public purse (which is contributed by taxpayers) prudently and wisely and incorruptibly. This assurance cannot be performed by the elected President. It is too much to ask of the office holder. The assurance should be done by Parliament, by the Auditor General and by a transparent process. I believe that we have serious failures in this regard, and that the problem is not recognized and not dealt with. Apart from protecting the reserves, the President has other duties to be a check on the government, including the appointment of key office bearers in the civil service and the exercise of clemency under the judicial system. In these functions, the sitting government creates various kinds of complicated arrangements to curtail the power of the President. Why have the office of the elected President in the first place? Over the past three decades, I remained skeptical and unenthusiastic about the role and office of the elected President. In spite of this skepticism, I did participate in the 2011 election. I did it partly out of mischief, partly out of a mistaken belief that I could make a difference but mainly because I was one of the few people that qualified under the "ridiculous" criteria. It worked out poorly for me. Who will be elected in 2023? It does not matter. It is an unnecessary and perhaps useless office anyway.   Tan Kin Lian      Read More →

A few days ago Temasek announced that it was very sorry for screwing up with the FTX investment and losing your money. It admitted losses of US$275 million ($374 million) but without transparency we can’t be sure that that is the full story as earlier funding rounds in which Temasek participated do not appear to be accounted for. In a fake display of contrition, Temasek management issued the following statement: “The investment team and senior management, who are ultimately responsible for the investment decisions made, took collective accountability and had their compensation reduced.” It went on to say it was “disappointed with the outcome of our investment, and the negative impact on our reputation”. What reputation? It’s just further confirmation that the highly (or astronomically we just don’t know as Ho Ching’s and the other top management’s compensation remains a state secret) paid managers don’t know what they’re doing. I’ve written countless articles on this subject over the past decade and also pointed out that much of Temasek’s claimed investment out performance since 1974 is due to IPO’ing* state assets like Singapore Airlines and SingTel that were injected into Temasek Holdings at ludicrously low valuations. For those who are interested I provide a list of links below. (*Initial Public Offering) It is not deemed necessary to tell us what the PM’s wife earned as CEO of Temasek (and now as Chair of Temasek Trust) as well as her other senior management colleagues, so how do we know if the pay cuts are meaningful or merely symbolic. After all, if Ho Ching was earning $100 million a year as CEO (and has several billion dollars in the pension fund) then a pay cut of $1 million is “peanuts”, as Mrs Goh Chok Tong said of sub-million dollar salaries back in the early 2000s. It doesn’t matter how flawed the investment process or how skimpy the due diligence. Temasek can be run like a casino or a gigantic slush fund for rewarding friends and cronies of the PM and the PAP. It doesn’t matter. Or like the criminal decision to rescue the Olam shareholders at a premium when their company would likely have gone bankrupt without it. Whatever decisions are made or could be made, Singaporeans have never seen any benefit from the reserves and never will as long as the PAP Government remain in office. The Government wants you to be fooled into thinking that the Net Investment Returns Contribution (NIRC), represents resources from the reserves which are spent on Singaporeans. But this is, like most PAP propaganda, lies and disinformation that I’ve likened to a smoke and mirrors exercise or a shell game of hiding the money. Firstly the Finance Minister, now seatwarmer-in-waiting, Lawrence Wong, puts much of the NIRC directly into long term funds and endowments where it is not included in current spending. In 2023 the NIRC amounted to $23 billion but a huge $17 billion went into top-ups to funds and endowments. Some years the amount going into endowments and top-ups has been 100% of the NIRC. Spending out from those long term funds is only a fraction of the money being put into them. The budget shows that typically about $4-5 billion goes out and this is amount is then not accountable to Parliament. Many of the accounts of these funds are not available for inspection and do not seem to be audited. Once money is allocated to these funds it is by law excluded from the amount used to calculate the NIRC. Why does this matter. Most of the money squirreled away in long term funds and endowments is money that is never going to see the light of day and be spent in a manner that would alleviate the cost of living squeeze for Singaporeans. Secondly I have highlighted the mystery of the healthcare budget where spending by MOH is highlighted in the budget but there is no disclosure of revenue collected by MOH Holdings, a private corporation like Temasek whose accounts the Government has hidden behind a paywall. I asked to see the accounts but MOH refused to provide them. I suspect that the surplus here, which could be several billion, is transferred directly to GIC and Temasek. Thirdly, there is the charade of making Singaporeans pay the full “market” value for the land that HDB buys from SLA to build new housing. In the Budget there is a sum set aside, out of tax and other revenues, used to give subsidies in the form of grants to Singaporeans to enable them to afford HDB land at the very high prices, called market rates. This is again is just a way of transferring money out of the Budget and into the reserves to avoid spending it on Singaporeans. These fake “subsidies” amount to several billions of dollars a year. Instead of providing money to you they are giving you a “subsidy ‘ which allows them to keep the prices of HDB artificially high but your individual spending power does not increase. As I have pointed out in my blogs on Ridoutgate, the Government fiercely resists any suggestion that land used to build homes for ordinary Singaporeans should be priced lower than “market”, with both Indranee Rajah and Desmond Lee saying in parliament that this would be a drain on the reserves. Yet huge tracts of land can go underutilised and subsequently occupied long term by Government Ministers (Shanmugam and Balakrishnan are the only cases we know about so far but there could be more). The rents are currently undisclosed but will inevitably be revealed to be so far below private rents and the economic value of the land as to constitute an easy opportunity to arbitrage risk free between the rental they can get on their private residences and the ones they pay for state property. So it’s clearly OK for this government to mismanage our land reserves to benefit an elite group of Singaporeans over the ordinary people. In fact, far from money coming out of the reserves, the true figures show that the Government has run a cash surplus since 2004 of about $400 billion and a deficit in only one year (2020). This excludes the surpluses of GIC, Temasek, MAS, Changi Airport Group, MOH Holdings and any other corporations the Government owns which are not paid as dividends to the Government. I have calculated, and Lawrence Wong has implicitly confirmed that my calculation is bang on, that the total value of the Government’s financial assets is at least $3 trillion. When the value of state land is added on, the value of the Government’s total assets should be at least $10 trillion or about $3 million per Singaporean citizen. Yet despite what should be overflowing coffers the Government pretends that the reserves are about to run out and that to invest any more than a meagre amount in our citizens’ welfare would be unfair to future generations. Singaporeans are always being told by LHL and LW that growing social needs mean taxes must be go up, particularly of the indirect variety that hit ordinary Singaporeans the hardest. The parallels with the NKF scandal and TT Durai are instructive. As I wrote here: In the trial the true amount of the reserves accumulated by NKF came out. NKF had said that reserves were not excessive and would run out in 3 years. They used this fear to get more donations from the public. Davinder Singh forced Durai to admit this was a deliberate deception. Similarly PAP argue, without telling us how much the reserves are or who they will be used for, that we need to keep accumulating reserves and squeezing the ordinary Singaporean otherwise it will be unfair to future generations. I have consistently shown that the reserves must be several trillion dollars and are likely in excess of $3 trillion in financial assets alone. In fact we probably have nearly $1 million reserves for every Singaporean. When you factor in the value of land owned by the Government, the reserves are easily in excess of $10 trillion or $3 million for every Singaporean. Yet LHL and the PAP keep trying to scare Singaporeans that taxes need to go up, belts need to tighten and tough choices must be made by the ordinary Singaporean in her 3 room HDB or Singapore will collapse. Tough choices that apparently do not have to be made by PAP Ministers who are able to take advantage of their control over state assets to utilize them for their own benefit, ignoring blatant conflicts of interest. In the same way the PM’s wife was appointed head of Temasek, ignoring a similarly blatant conflict of interest and her compensation kept secret without any public interest justification. Until you have MPs who are prepared to ask tough questions but also the expertise to ask the right questions and to persist in that line of questioning you will never know the truth about the reserves. In fact you will probably need to change the government and throw the PAP out of office to get the whole truth. Ridoutgate would never have come to light if I hadn’t dared to publish articles about it, even though oblique references had already been made by opposition in the parliament before I published. What is happening to our reserves? There are two possibilities. The more likely one is that the coffers are overflowing and there is no excuse for the Government’s claims that the reserves will run out. Singaporeans should receive vastly improved dividends from the reserves and can aspire at last to Goh Chok Tong’s long promised Swiss standard of living. The second possibility is that something is seriously wrong, the reserves are a gigantic Ponzi scheme and those in charge have some serious explaining to do.   Kenneth Jeyaretnam   About the author: I’m a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That’s why I’ve never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I’m quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don’t work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I’m a liberal. I’m not sure what the middle think of me. I don’t think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I’m a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I’m not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean.      Read More →