Landslide or freak election, Army will not move in

Catherine Lim asked LKY yesterday if he would send in the army should there be a freak election. And the answer is no. So opposition parties can feel safer now, that the army would not do the unthinkable, or no one would do the unthinkable. LKY's reassurance was based on the serious thought that this govt had put in to design a near perfect system with the President as the last man to protect the money in the reserve. The President will be there to block any attempt to spend the reserve, as if this is the only threat to the nation should an opposition party comes to power. The underlying assumption is that the President is infallible, a man of unquestionable integrity and will not change side and join the new govt to loot the country's coffer. I am not referring to the incumbent President. There are many Presidents that will come our way. Should Singaporeans sleep well, that this assumption is good enough to save the country when that day comes? If Presidents are immortals or demigods, I think everything will be fine. The only problem is that scoundrels can come and pass themselves off as saints. Maybe sending in the army is a more pragmatic option.

DBS netted a Foreign Talent again

Champagne popped yesterday and another round of celebration as DBS announced that it had successfully searched and found another foreign talent to helm the bank. The appointment of Piyush Gupta, a PR, was welcomed as another great achievement and would do DBS a lot of good in its banking business though it also announced that nothing would change and business as usual. There were happy faces everywhere. The appointment of another PR in the number one govt bank is, sad to say, another confirmation of our failure in nurturing and developing our local talents for the big league. And we have been doing this over and over again for the last few decades and still repeating the same formula without any wiser. Our local talents that were sent overseas to the best Ivy League universities in the US and Europe are still unfit to be the CEO of a local bank and many of our big organisations. And they will never be, if things are not changed. Our formula is simple. Send our best to foreign universities with a long string attached. On completion of their 4 years of studies, pull the string and haul them back to our little ponds to be fed and grow fat, like the kois. Big and beautiful to look at, full of fat. And when we need marlins, sharks and whales to swim in the oceans, expectedly none will be fit for the job. So we will forever be dependant on foreign talents to fill jobs that require exposure and experience in the international arena. Our mandarins are experienced only to swim in the little fish ponds. Maybe the 4 years of exposure to the local lifestyle will equip them with enough knowledge to buy kindergartens, theatres, hotels and landed properties. Maybe football clubs with be next. In contrast, India and some other countries allowed their best to stay on in America and Europe, join the big league MNCs, and grow with them. They were sent to swim the seven seas, brave the storms, and survived, fit and all muscles, to take on the world. It is thus not unexpected for our local organisations with big dreams of going international to be dependant on foreign talents, and forever, if our policy on nurturing and developing our own talents is not changed. We will continue to breed ponds of beautiful and fat kois, but no marlins, no sharks and no whales.

How China will destroy your retirement

Below is an article by an American and spreading with the help of unthinking Singaporeans to show how bad China is. The fact is that our retirement has been destroyed by America in their subprime fiasco and the financial crisis they have created. Now they are pointing the finger at China. For goodness sake, stupid Asians and Singaporeans. Think, use your little numbskull before they expired. How China will destroy your retirement The Shanghai index just laid a horrible egg. Wall Street fainted and investors world-wide took to the hills. How could this happen? 1. Loan growth at China’s central bank fell by 80% in the last 30 days. 2. After a spate of frantic buying this spring, China has stopped stockpiling raw materials, which it bought for pennies on the dollar. The Baltic Dry Index has plunged 25% since late July. 3. The massive amounts of cash that Beijing has pumped into its economy has not been properly absorbed. It has hemorrhaged into speculation. That’s why, although profits for China companies are DOWN by 30%, the Shanghai index is UP 80%. Can you spell BUBBLE? 4. It’s not just stocks, either. The most expensive housing in the world is now in China. Yes, that is correct. The ratio of property prices to income is now SEVEN TIMES HIGHER in China than in the U.S. It looks like the Japanese land bubble in the ’80s, but with one billion people involved this time around. Can you spell CRASH? 5. On October 1, the China Communist Party holds the 60th anniversary of Mao’s Long March. Expect Beijing to Band Aid this Ponzi scheme together until October. But, as the last few days have shown, the lie cannot last much longer. WE HAVE 30 DAYS—TOPS. Urgent You Act I’m Dick Young and I am convinced that China’s Ponzi Scheme will not work for much longer. And when it crashes to the ground after October 1, look out, because Wall Street goes with it. Don’t bother looking for your retirement plans in the rubble. They’ll be pulverized. It does not have to be this way. Indeed, my subscribers have a different plan. We will be very busy over the next 30 days, but it is work that will set us up for life.

We have this great bull story in the media again

We are short of talents. Companies cannot find enough of accountants and finance professionals. And recently we even bragged so loudly that we are recruiting doctors and medical professionals in big numbers from all over the world. My take is that either our tertiary institutions were are sleeping and not producing enough qualified candidates to feed the needs of the economy, or that our graduates were of no talents and not good enough for the industry. So either we don't have the head counts or plenty of useless, half baked and unemployable graduates. So, the lack of local talent must be true. All the statistics and surveys say so. What are we going to do about it? Apply the instant tree formula and go and recruit from all over the world, including graduates from third world and universities ranked lower than our esteemed local universities. Why did I get this feeling that something is not right? How could world class universities not producing graduates that are considered as talents and graduates from less than world class universities are grabbed like hot properties, great talents? If our universities are producing non talents, then we might as well close them down and save the money. And forget about the 4th university.

Foreign or local workers not an issue

I am tempted to agree with Lim Swee Say that foreign worker local worker divide should not be an issue. It is productivity. We need productive workers to do the job well at the lowest cost. This is like white cat black cat, no issue. Just catch the mice. I must clarify here that when Deng Xiaoping said this, foreign and local workers was not an issue in China. He was talking about Chinese workers only. And I believe Swee Say would also have said that whatever, citizens must come first. In our context, we may also claim that we are different. We are small and cannot be isolated. We are immigrants from the start. So living on the entrepreneur skills and hard work of foreign workers should be a part of our secret formula to success. And lazy and less productive workers cannot get away with it. They may be citizens, so what? They have done NS, big sacrifice, so what? They need to be competitive and productive and be better and cheaper than the foreign workers if they want to be counted. We have to be real and not be bogged down by citizens and non citizens. This is the real world. Singaporeans must work as hard as the foreign workers. There are many schemes to help them to be productive and to earn better incomes. But if they do not want to buck up, it is their own fault. We are competing in an international environment when all barriers to entry have been removed. Every country is buying talent. Our non talents can go elsewhere and be foreign talents and be welcomed. The above is just for discussion. It is meant to be provocative, to stimulate thinking out of the box.