CPF – A cut off age to stop contributing

CPF is a forced savings towards a retirement fund, a time and age when the contributor is expected to retire from active employment and to take life at a slower pace with the life savings that he had set aside. At some point in time, people stop working or retire. Some may choose to continue to work if they are physically able, wanted to or needed to. In the last case, it is likely that there is no or not enough savings and no other form of financial support from the family.
 
In general, people may want to retire after spending a whole life working.
And the retirement fund comes in handy for this purpose. Some may not have much but could make do with family support and could choose to enjoy a life of leisure within their means.
 
Under the CPF scheme, there is no such thing as a cut off age when a person can stop contributing. In the case of employment, including self employed, one can still be economically active even at 70, 80 or 90 and is expected to contribute to the CPF, for the self employed into the Medisave Account. What the fuck for? These economically active seniors are in much better financial situation than those who have retired, unemployed and have no income. What are they contributing into the CPF for, for their retirement? If they are still working at such a ripe age, many would pass away without knowing what is retirement?
 
In the case of self employed, even if their Medisave Accounts have exceeded the minimum sum, they are legally required to contribute more to renew their licence. What for? Why is there no cut off date for a person to stop contributing to the CPF/Medisave? Has the CPF Board forgotten what is CPF contribution all about? Or they are treating this as a kind of taxation? You work, you contribute to the Fund. You want your licence, you pay up.
 
What is going on? There must be a cut off age when contributing to the CPF in any forms except on a voluntary basis must ceased.

Kopi Level - Green

A foreign professor telling us that we are walking naked

In his article in the Today paper on 3 Jul 14, ‘Spore universities’ foreign talent policies need to change’, Professor Philip Holden, revisited the issue of disappearing Singaporean faculty members in the local universities raised by Seah Kian Peng earlier in Parliament. His observation, ‘While more than half of current tenured faculty in the university system are Singaporean, Singaporeans now constitute only a quarter of early career academics on the tenure track at NUS and NTU.’ Is this planned and the desired goal?
 
What is Philip Holden trying to say? There are too few Singaporeans in the university faculties and going to get bad in the future? To him this is a problem. To Singapore, is it a problem? Maybe lah. Maybe just enough to ‘talk talk’ and nothing more to it. It was discussed in Parliament, yes, but everything is forgotten. To Holden, this is not a little problem that is good enough for after dinner talk but serious enough to demand action. He said, ‘My experience as a visiting scholar in Canada over the past years suggests that discussions may not be enough and should be supplemented by concrete policy changes.’
 
Funny that a foreigner could see problems in our foreign talent policies and a problem serious enough to require actions while our chaps didn’t see anything wrong and a few talking cock sessions will do, nothing needs to be done? In a survey done, it ‘found that more than 80 per cent of Singaporean graduate students, whether abroad or in the Republic, answered “yes” or “maybe” when asked if they felt local universities prefer to hire non Singaporeans.’ Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Dunno leh, probably not important. The whole faculty can go to foreigner should be no issue too what? After all this is getting to become a non country or a non nation. Anything wrong with foreigners teaching us about our history, culture and literature?
 
There were rumours and murmurs that the selection committees of our local universities were dominated by foreigners who have the final say in who to hire. I can’t believe that this is the case. Next time our political appointees could also be decided by a panel of foreigners and no one will bat an eyelid. What’s wrong with it? Anyone who says foreigners taking over the recruitment of faculty members is unacceptable and must be xenophobic. And anyone saying bad things about the industries being dominated by foreigners and foreigners hiring their own kinds are also xenophobic and deserves to be whacked. We are a free economy and we welcome talents from the whole world. This island belongs to everyone here.
 
What the ….?

Kopi Level - Green

HFT – How much did they hide from you

Michael Lewis' 'Flashboys: Cracking the money code' tells how HFTs rig markets
By Sanjay Kumar Singh, ET Bureau | 30 Jun, 2014,

‘….Michael Lewis, who has written such highly-acclaimed books as Liar's poker, The big short and Moneyball, tackles the subject of high-frequency trading in his latest work, 'Flashboys: Cracking the money code.'

Imagine that you are trying to buy a company's stocks priced at Rs 100 over the Internet. As soon as you put in a bid to buy the stock, its price jumps to Rs 102 and your order doesn't get executed. You wait for a while, get frustrated, and then ultimately buy the stock at the slightly higher price.

Something similar happens when you try to sell a stock. This time the price moves lower, forcing you to take a small loss. It is as if someone has read your mind, acted just ahead of you, and thwarted you. Today technology makes it possible for entities called high frequency traders ( HFT) to do such front-running (which means to learn an investor's intentions and profit from them by acting ahead of him).

When you send a buy or sell order to a stock exchange, its matching engines match your buy orders with others' sell orders and enable you to buy a stock at the best possible price. But what if the process doesn't run cleanly? What if there are intermediaries who can intercept your orders midway and glean the information therein?

They then run ahead of you and buy all the stocks available on all the exchanges and then put in sell orders at higher prices, thereby forcing you to buy at those prices, especially when orders are very largesized. This is a simplified description of what high-frequency traders do.

Now, you might argue: how much would buying a stock for two rupees extra matter in the larger scheme of things? But imagine a couple of bucks earned on millions of transactions—some of them worth thousands or even millions of dollars. All those little gains then add up. That's how HFTs make their billions.

One of the functions of a stock exchange is to make risk capital available to entrepreneurs. Intermediaries like HFTs make money while adding no value to this process, essentially indulging in a form of rent-seeking. They end up raising the cost of capital for entrepreneurs….

Even US stock exchanges were hand-in-glove with them, allowing them to place their servers close to the exchange's servers, thereby gifting HFTs that tiny micro-second's advantage. Broking firms also played a part. Instead of executing the orders they got themselves, they would redirect them to HFTs, who fleeced the customer while giving broking firms a kickback. It is this nexus that Lewis exposes in his book….Well, HFTs have spread their tentacles to exchanges around the globe. The next time the price of a stock jumps suddenly when you try to buy it, or a flash crash occurs, ask yourself: have HFTs arrived?’

The examples given by Lewis were simply criminal in nature. How much more the public did not know about the devious and criminal activities of HFT? If stock exchanges knew about how HFT operates as described, and allowed HFT into their systems, what shall be done to the management of the exchanges? If govts knew the same things are happening and do not stop them, what kind of govts are they? Heard of accomplices or partners in crimes?

Kopi Level - Green

Japan marching to war

The final chapter in the remilitarizing of Japan has been written with the Abe administration denouncing its Pacifist Constitution imposed by the Americans after its barbaric and brutal invasion of Asia and South East Asia. The spate of cruelties and atrocities inflicted on the people of Asia and South East Asia were beyond description, even more vicious than what the Germans did to the Jews. These acts led to the Americans lifting all restraints to drop two atomic bombs into Japanese cities as just deserts for the abominable crimes of the Japanese Imperial Army.
 
In contrast, today America is backing and supporting the Japanese to rearm, which is a fallacy anyway as the Japanese have already built an armed force more powerful than any country in Asia, and deceptively called it a Self Defence Force. In the name of defending Japan against a hyped up threat of an aggressive China, by the way China was the biggest victim of Japanese invasion and atrocities in WW2, and Japan is now asserting itself to conduct wars outside Japan on the excuse that China is an aggressive nation.
 
Without the revisionist reinterpretation of its Pacifist Constitution, the Japanese Defence Force is all ready and provided by its Constitution to defend Japan against any attacks by external forces. There is no need to reinterpret the Constitution to allow it to be involved in wars outside Japan. The intent is simply to allow Japan to conduct wars of aggression all over again.
 
While Japan is raising its military posture, behaving provocatively against its immediate neighbours, the whole world watched in silence, and the Americans clapped their hands in approval. The only retribution that the Americans deserved for this wanton support granted to the most barbaric nation in modern history is to be hit by another Pearl Harbour of a bigger scale by Japan. That would be rightful justice for encouraging and supporting a wild beast and unleashing it into the international arena.
 
Japan has not changed a single bit in its wild and ferocious ambition to be a big colonial power. China and the Koreans are prepared to deal with this animal should it return to its evil ways. The only country that is willingly and happily to be deceived by the pretentious Japanese is the USA, a country that the Japanese have a score to settle, to return the favour of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
History will repeat itself to those that refused to learn from their historical past.

Kopi Level - Green

Medishield Life – What to worry about?

Gan Kim Yong has fleshed out some of the details concerning premiums payable in year 2015 and year 2019. Under Medishield Life, with higher payouts and benefits, it is expected that the premiums should logically be higher. But given the fact that the coverage is for everyone, young and old, covering the whole population with everyone paying, would there be economy of scale to offset the premiums to make it even lower instead?

Gan Kim Yong announced that the premiums would be held unchanged for the next 5 years which is quite reassuring. This is possible by taking into consideration all contingencies that could be foreseen, a kind of front loading. So whatever that needs to be added in, real or imagination, or just to take care of the unexpected has already been added to the premiums payable. Just wondering what is the percentage in this front loading to the actual cost? If it is 30%, it means the premiums are already 30% higher than it should be. And this is a very conservative guess. What if you have a decision maker that wants to think of everything under the sky that could crop up and wants to include them for safety measures, never mind, it is ok to collect more?

Would Gan Kim Yong be transparent as to how much has already been added in the calculation of the premiums? There are enough statistics from the Medisave schemes to give a reasonable estimate of claims against cost. As Gerald Giam has pointed out in Parliament, the claims came up to be 67% of the premiums collected. I stand corrected if the number is slightly different from Gerald’s number. The data shows that there is room for the lowering of the premiums instead of raising it like someone who wants to cover front and back and top and bottom, every hole that he can possibly think off or imagine.

Gan Kim Yong has given the impression that he is very concern about the cost of premiums and wanting to ensure that it will remain affordable. I find the affordable formula frightening if the cost of medicare in hospitals is not reined in and not allow to run away like a wild horse. It would be more reassuring if he also announces that the policy and objective of the Medishield Life is not profit making and any profit would be ploughed back to lower the premiums in the future. Would he commit to this?

The other frightening thing about the premium tables is the premium for the oldies. Oldies are expected to continue to pay premiums up to the age of 90. How many people would have the money to pay premiums at that age? Many would have long retired by the time they reached 65 or 70. The PMEs may even be retired by 50 or 55 and cannot find reasonable employment. There are exceptions for people to work to 90. Maybe you can find some working as cleaners in the hawker centres and food courts.

Would Gan Kim Yong want to consider lobbing off the senior citizens from his tables, say by age 70 or 75? Would it be too big a burden for the govt to pay for the oldies? He has said that there will be more govt subsidies to help the seniors, why not have a policy to remove them from the premium tables and the govt absorb the cost? Under the PGP, those 80 and above will not have to pay for the Medishield Life premiums. Is this applicable to those in the pioneer generation but not yet 80? Why is this not extended to the future seniors when they hit 80? How many seniors in the future can afford to continue to pay Medishield Life premiums after paying for a life time and no longer having an income?

Kopi Level - Green