I must say that there are many parallels between the USA and Singapore, though one is a giant and the other is a midget but deluding itself that it is also a giant. Singapore likes to copy whatever the Americans were doing. If the Americans can do it, it must be the right thing to do, never mind if the USA is of continental size and has 330m population while Singapore is just a piece of rock with 3m citizens and other 3m foreigners.
When the Wall Street Hedge Funds conned or duped the NYSE to allow them to use high speed computers and high speed trading to cheat the small investors, think GameStop, and change the rules to deregulate and led the crooks in the Hedge Funds to violate all the rules and regulations in unfair trading against the retail investors, creating scrip lending for the small investors to lend their scrips to the Hedge Funds to short the stocks and destroy their values, small bids to allow the super computers to fool around with minimal cost, creating false trading to mislead, hiding their buy and sell positions, etc etc, guess what Singapore Exchange did? No prizes for correct answer.
Now what did Singapore do that is parallel to the USA that is destroying the jobs of the middle class? Sounds familiar already. The American govt allowed the big American corporations to move their operations to China to take advantage of cheap labour, cheap land and rentals and cheap everything, to make super profits without any consideration to the loss of jobs that would affect the American middle class and create a vacuum that could not be filled. Many of the comfortable Americans lost their jobs and became poor! And thanks to the short sightedness and silly economic policies of the American govt, China got most of the jobs and provide full employment to their hungry millions of workers. And China never looked back since and went on to leapfrogging ahead of the Americans.
Singapore did not move its factories to China. Neither did Singapore move its factories to India. It hardly had any. Singapore brought in the Indians/foreigners provided them with good jobs to replace the Singaporean PMETs until many of the PMETS lost their jobs, through early retirement, retrenchment, sacked, or dismissed as unfits or no skills, and the Indians/foreigners from little backward villages of India and the world are hoisted into the sky as the most needed talents, with the skills that Singapore needed, that Singaporeans could not provide.
The end result is the same as in the USA. Replacing jobs used to be given to Singaporeans to the Indians and foreigners while the American jobs were given to Chinese in China and other parts of the world. American middle class becomes unemployable, jobless. Singaporean middle class gone the same way, for the simple stupid reason of cheaper and better. American solved the unemployment problem of China by creating their own unemployment problem. Singapore provided a few hundred thousand jobs for India at the expense of its own PMETs and creating its own unemployment and underemployment problems for its citizens.
Now the foreigners, especially the Indians, are the new middle class in Singapore, taking over the plum jobs and buying private properties in Singapore from the jobless middle class Singaporeans that have to downgrade to HDB, ie govt housing. The American middle class are having their homes repossessed while the Chinese in China are moving in to new middle class homes.
The parallel is astounding. Neglecting the well beings of citizens for cheap economic gains. What would be the long term effects of this cruel and damaging policies on the citizens of both countries? The jobs lost by the American economy are not going to come back to American homeland. Gone forever. The foreigners that were invited to take up good jobs in Singapore, many are not going away either.
What would be the fate of the American middle class and the fate of the Singapore middle class? Think of the social damage caused to the lives of the middle class of both countries.
PS. The Americans are now investigating their stock market practices to see if the small investors are protected. Or are they going to go after the small investors to protect the Hedge Funds and the crooks in NYSE collaborating with the funds to cheat the small investors?
'The Treasury statement said that both the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were reviewing whether trading practices were consistent with “investor protection and fair and efficient markets”.
The meeting on Thursday included officials from Treasury, the SEC and CFTC and officials from the Federal Reserve Board and the Fed's New York regional bank, which serves as a link for the Fed to Wall Street.
In comments earlier Thursday, Yellen said in an ABC television interview that she had convened the meeting because it was important “to make sure that our financial markets are functioning properly and efficiently and that investors are protected”.'
Source: AP