The Missionaries

As Dr Goh's body lays in Parliament House awaiting a state funeral, the people came from near and far to pay their last respects and tributes to a great and honourable man who had done so much for so little for his country. All the words were of the works that he had conceived and done. They remembered the times they met him when he was serving as a minister and busily doing what he had to do. And words would not be enough to describe all the things that Goh Keng Swee had done in his ministries. One word was starkingly absent. No one mentions anything about sacrifice. No one tells how men of his time, including senior civil servants, slogged through days and nights just to get the job done. If I can recollect, even when he was a minister, he had never complained about the sacrifice he made for the people and country. For he did not need to justify for himself or what he was doing. There were plenty of works to be done and they went about it like missionaries. A calling, a duty to the people and the country. And they did a damn good job for it without the glamour and the trappings of extravagant rewards to go with it. They were men and women on a mission. Dr Goh was an exceptional missionary.

Twisted logic of high finance

Attacking a country’s currency, stock market or financial system, if done by a country is tantamount to a hostile act, an act of war. Done by a bunch of fund managers, it is ok. They can bring down the currency or financial system of a country and it is considered legitimate, part and parcel of investment strategies! And sovereign countries allow this to happen and could not do anything about it. Who are these fund managers? A bunch of crooks, or are they a cloak and dagger operation of some govts? The latter seems easier to handle while a bunch of crooks are free to do whatever damage they could to bring a country to its knee, to bankrupt countries. And the US is accusing China as a currency manipulator for controlling the exchange rate of Yuan. They want China to free the Yuan to allow the crooks to manipulate it under the guise that if it has a weakness they have the right to bring it down. With the crooks operating as an irresponsible wolf pack out to destroy countries and their financial system, it is better that countries return to the fixed exchange rate system to protect themselves. Mahathir in this sense has done the right thing. China is also doing the right thing to protect itself. Let the West and their freedom to act, irresponsibly, to destroy themselves at their own time. But Obama knows that this is wrong and trying to curb the madness in the finance industry inside the US.

How much did we subsidise tertiary education?

In my article yesterday, the British universities are charging EU and their own citizens a flat fee of 3,290 pounds and international students at 21,400 pounds. In our case, we charge our citizens $7000 against $11,000 for international students. Two points to make from this comparison. The cost of education in British universities are much cheaper than ours as relatively their cost of living are higher. The second point is that they make international students pay 7 times what their citizens paid. This means that if the cost of education is double what their citizens are paying, guessing only, then each international students could be subsidizing 50% of the tuition fee of 5 UK/EU students. It is a case of looking after their citizens first. Let's take a look at the tuition cost and subsidies as published by the NUS website. For an Arts and Social Science course, the grant or subsidy is $19,000. This plus the $7,000 fee the students are paying will make up the full tuition cost, ie $26,000. And if we apply the same formula for the cost of education in the UK, the British are actually charging international students the full fees, with practically no subsidies. What about our international students. If the full cost is $26,000 and our international students are paying $11,000, then they should be receiving a subsidy of $15,000. According to the NUS website, the full fee for international students is $30,000 and they too get a $19,000 grant. I am not going to quibble why the full fee between citizen and non citizen has a $4,000 difference. But why do we need to offer international students a $19,000 grant? Could we charge international students a little more to subsidise our local students like what the British are doing? Of course we can't charge them the same 21,400 pounds or about $42,800 pa. We may also be world class but no foreigners will want to pay the same for a Singapore education if they could get a British one. Still we could raise it to maybe $15,000 or $20,000 if our education is really world class, and at a 50% discount to what the British universities are charging, it must still be a bargain. We could then charge our citizens much lesser, subsidised by international students instead of the govt subsidising international students to a tune of $19,000.

Time to arrest the big fund managers for treason

I just read this from the Telegraph. From Telegraph “Germany’s ‘desperate’ short ban triggers capital flight to Switzerland” A year ago, Germany’s financial regulator BaFin warned that the toxic debts of the country’s banks would blow up “like a grenade” once hidden losses from the credit crisis caught up with them. An internal memo at the time showed that BaFin feared write-offs might top 800bn (£688bn), twice the reserves of Germany’s financial institutions. Nobody paid much attention. But the regulator’s shock move on Tuesday night to stop short trading on banks, insurers, eurozone bonds as well as a ban credit default swaps (CDS) on sovereign debt has left markets wondering whether the slow fuse on Germany’s banking system has finally detonated. BaFin spoke of “extraordinary volatility” and said CDS moves were jeopardising “the stability of the financial system as a whole”. It is unsettling that the BaFin should opt for such drastic measures a week after EU leaders thought they had overawed markets with a 750bn rescue package and direct purchases of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish debt by the European Central Bank. BaFin’s heavy-handed move seems to proclaim that the rescue has failed.... The big fund managers think they are very smart in shorting the Euro or any stocks or currencies in a big way to make money. Such action is an equivalent to a run on the banks. It is a deliberate attempt in creating fear which could precipitate into a crisis while govts and regulators are trying to solve the problem. Those involved in such activities should be arrested for treason. The sentiment in the stock market is now so bad that everyone is staying out. The cumulative actions of the big speculators will destroy the world's financial system if not put to a stop. They are criminals!

How much is our world class education?

Singapore citizens pay about $7000 tuition fee per year at NUS for year 2010/11. International students pay about $11,000. We consider ourselves very lucky to receive a tertiary education in one of the top universities in the world. The tuition fee for Imperial College of London, the top 3 university in UK and ranked 5th in the world by Times is 3,290 pounds for UK and EU citizens. For international students the fee is 21,400 pounds for an Engineering course. Am I right to say that a UK or EU citizen is paying lesser for a world class education in Imperial College than our citizens in NUS? The exchange rate is S$2 to a pound. In fact practically all the universities in UK is charging the same tuition fee for UK and EU citizens.