Stupid Bank

My friend related this incident to me. His rich Malaysian client came to Singapore to open a joint account with his daughter. The client has already an account in this stupid bank. You know what? They made him wait for two hours before attending to him. He got so frustrated that he even closed his existing account and went to another local bank to open his account. And the service was simply swift and efficient. The stupid bank simply lost a big customer and not only that, its bad service will be spread by this client to his friends. And better still, this stupid bank is in the process of doing something unproductive, like checking on old records of clients and if the photocopies of ICs in their record are not to their liking they are asking their clients to make another copy for their records. They think the clerks in the banks have nothing useful to kill time but their high net worth clients will have time to take the trouble to make photocopies of ICs to send to the stupid bank. Instead of doing business or making things easy for its clients, it chose to irritate clients with its stupidity and arrogance. Ridiculous but the stupid bank will claim that it is efficiency and the right thing to do.

The difficult and unspoken truth

In politics, some truths are just too uncomfortable and difficult to be spoken. It is not that they are difficult to understand. It could be the simplest thing, a common knowledge, and like the proverbial elephant in the classroom, no one admits that it is there. Take for example the Gang of Four in China during the Cultural Revolution. Whenever the Chinese mentioned the Gang of Four, they would put up five fingers. The fifth finger stood for the unspoken truth. We have our own version of unspoken truth. In fact we have many unspoken truths. Internet and blogs have allowed some to surface and spoken brazenly as they really are. However, in the old media or in cocktail gossips, many would just look at one another in the eyes, perhaps with a little smile or an obliging nod when the unspoken truth happened to be the topic. Singaporeans are not dumb. They just pretend to be stupid or innocent, or even naïve by not talking about the unspoken truth. Take the issue of the disappearing savings of the Singaporeans, their hard earned savings all these years, who have robbed them of it? Singaporeans could have a lot of money saved, in the CPF or in their bank accounts. Why are Singaporeans feeling so poor, with their savings gone? Some may say the savings are transferred, from cash in the savings accounts to assets. So Singaporeans have some expensive assets like housing and cars and pieces of paper called COEs. Could Singaporeans continue to own their properties and cars and still have a lot of cash in their savings? Possible? If the answer is yes, then someone must have robbed them of their savings? The answer is in the difficult and unspoken truth.

When Regulators violate their own rules and principles

Below is part of an article I copied from Yahoo. Investing Dying as Computer Trading, ETFs & Dark Pools Proliferate On Tuesday January 4, 2011 There's an old Wall Street adage meant to inspire investors that goes "it's not a stock market, but a market of stocks." Consider that dead. Computer trading, dark pools and exchange-traded funds are dominating market action on a daily basis, statistics show, killing the buy and hold philosophy still attempted by many professional and retail investors alike. Everything moves up or down together at a speed faster than which a normal person can react, traders said. High frequency trading accounts for 70 percent of market volume on a daily basis, according to several traders' estimates. The average holding period for U.S. stocks is now just 2.8 months, according to the Crosscurrents newsletter. In the 1980s, it was two years. "The theory that buy-and-hold was the superior way to ensure gains over the long term, has been ditched completely in favor of technology," said Alan Newman, author of the monthly newsletter. "HFT promises gains are best provided by holding periods measuring as few as microseconds, possibly a few minutes, or at worst, a few hours." The problem is only made worst by the proliferation of exchange-traded funds, traders said. The vehicles, which make trading a group of stocks as easy as buying and selling an individual security, passed the $1 trillion in assets mark at the end of last year, according to BlackRock. This is probably why all ten sectors of the S&P 500 finished in the black for two consecutive years, something that's only happened one other time since 1960, according to Bespoke Investment Group. "The capital raising stock market of the past hundred years has morphed in just the last 10 years into a casino," said Sal Arnuk of Themis Trading and a market infrastructure expert who advised the SEC after last year's so-called Flash Crash. "Who is doing the fundamental work analyzing stocks? In the end, we've greatly increased systemic risk." Another factor jumped into the fray in December: dark pools. Off-exchange trading accounted for more than a third of the trading volume in December, says Raymond James. While these trades are eventually reported to the public markets, they further damage price discovery, an essential element for a fair securities market, investors said. "This was a record high market share for off-exchange trading and we believe the SEC will ultimately be forced to react to support the price discovery process by limiting off-exchange trading for all traces except for large block trades," wrote Raymond James analyst Patrick O'Shaughnessy in a note to clients yesterday. "This destroys capital markets," said Jon Najarian, co-founder of TradeMonster and a 'Fast Money' trader. "Hidden trading venues, where some participants get to peek at the orders as they are entered so long as they agree to 'interact' with a minimum percentage, is not an exchange, it's a license to steal."....

Romancing the gangsters

The front page of Today paper has a full page advert on a HBO movie, ‘Boardwalk Empire’. Words like Dazzling, Rich & Cinematic, Golden Globe Nominations, Best Television Series etc etc. The movie is all about politicians and gangsters with infamous names like Nucky Thompson, Jimmy Darmody, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano etc etc. These were the ‘great men’ of the day, controlling money and all things illegal. Even without looking at the movie, one can easily guess that it will be about the glorification of the gangsters of days gone by. And they will be well dressed, well mannered, even ill mannered will be in a style of its own, and they called the shot. They make the lives of the people around them sweet or painful. And they could do it by wielding power and money, plentiful of money. Today such gangsters are probably still around in China, India, Japan, Taiwan and Korea. Maybe some still exist in Asean countries. In Singapore, if we allow the neighbourhood kids to grow up unhindered, and carrying their parangs around, we will have some golden days to come, especially with the two IRs acting as the backdrop. They will graduate from burning cars, painting doors of O$P$ and slashing kids in shopping malls to greater things. In ten or twenty years’ time, we could also produce great gangster movies of our own. But the names will be different. It is cool to be gangsters. The moral of the story is that crooks can be turned into legends.

Calling all robbers and pirates

Do robbers and pirates have a heart? I mean a sense of compassion and charity? Would robbers and pirates, after robbing everything from their helpless victims, turn around and throw money to charity, to do community services, helping the poor? Historically many have done so in the past. The irony of robbers and pirates turning philanthropists have been written into story books, and some even made into movies. Some, after becoming very rich and successful, took on a clean image of very nice businessmen and socialites in high societies. Modern day robbers and pirates don’t seem to want to do much. They are more concerned with their own well beings than those they have robbed. Their greed is boundless. Or maybe they have not robbed enough. Even then, it is good to give a token back to society. Have a little heart, or pretend to have a little heart. It won’t hurt that much. No need to give the fortune away, just a few crumbs will do. The crumbs could mean a lot to those who have nothing or have little. And definitely the poor recipients will be very grateful for the charity. And I can assure them that it is a damn good feeling to give. But that is only the intangible part. For the believers, the more they give the more they will receive. Give until it hurts. Don’t worry, the return will be in many folds, 10 folds, 50 folds or 100 folds, just give, no need to think. I do want people to think who they are giving to. Don’t ever give to the rich or people who are in the business of profiting from your giving to become richer. Does that ring a bell?