What do u have to say about this Singapore in deep deep financial dodo.

[Jah_rastafar_I]

http://futurefastforward.com/feature-articles/3200





Look To The East For The Tsunami Wave, Not Europe - By Matthias Chang (12/2/10) PDF Print E-mail
By Matthias Chang
Thursday, 11 February 2010 20:25

This will be one of my shortest articles as it is written as a RED ALERT.

When I send out Red Alerts, it is a dire warning and a call for immediate action to protect your wealth (if there is any remaining).

Of late, I have been reading articles (some of which I have posted to the website) suggesting that Greece would be the trigger for the 2nd wave of the Global Tsunami. Obviously, if Greece defaults and goes belly up, it will have a disastrous effect, but not in the way that I see it.

There may be some manipulated “flight to safety to US dollars” (which itself is a dumb thing to do) in the short run. How can dollar be a currency haven when its value is total junk – toilet paper!

Such so-called “flight to safety” is a reflection of the intensity of the on-going currency warfare, principally between the Dollar and the Euro and skirmishes between the Dollar and the Yuan. But, this manipulation by the US global banks would not last and will be exposed for what it is – a global scam.

Since July last year, policy makers and so-called experts have relied on economic recovery in Asia to spur global growth and the resumption of the good times. Such thinking reflects a muddle mind.

Every economy in Asia is export-orientated and the domestic economies are just too small to take up the drastic fall in exports. Following Bernanke’s reckless lead, they have all jumped on the band wagon of quantitative easing – the printing of massive fiat monies (electronically or otherwise). Inflation has soared!

In an earlier posting to my website, I have indicated that there is a weak link holding up the Asian economies, and it is not China.


It is Singapore - touted by her US financial masters as an island of prosperity and financial stability. This is one of the biggest hoax since the collapse of Lehman Bros.

Singapore’s ratio of debt to GDP is a whopping 99.2 percent.

But no one seems to be taking any notice. Why are they making so much fuss over Greece, when Singapore is worse off?

If Singapore goes belly up, forget about any substantial growth in Asia to spur global recovery. Anyone who knows about the way business is done in the ASEAN region knows too well that if Singapore defaults, Indonesia will be the first to sink, followed rapidly by Thailand and Malaysia. The contagion will then spread to the rest of Asia. China will not be able to put out the fire.

China will survive the turmoil, but barely.

This is my nightmare scenario. And the second Tsunami is coming.

When?

After the failure of Europe to solve the problems of Greece, Spain and Portugal!

But money can be made from this madness.

SHORT THE SINGAPORE DOLLARS AND GET YOUR FUNDS OUT BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.

 

[singveld]

greece should tell their people who lend them money

greece should tell the banks, we have no money left, you want money from us.

THIS IS SPARTA!!!!!

 

[Watchman]

Singapore can always sell bonds and print more currency to compensate like USA .

 

[MarrickG]

Dun worry. We will continue to buy high and sell low.

 

[johnny333]

I was browsing in the library & came across an amusing article in Time. This Neel Chowdhury must spend more time lounging in the bars at Clark Quay than at his job




http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1920285_1920320_1920253,00.html

A Port in the Storm
By NEEL CHOWDHURY Thursday, Sep. 03, 2009



The condition of Singapore's economy can often be judged from the emerald waters surrounding it. A tiny 268-sq.-mi. (697 sq km) island city-state with the busiest port in the world, Singapore began in 1819 in founder Stamford Raffles' words as an "emporium of goods" and has never forgotten the importance of maritime trade. Today the value of Singapore's annual exports is 2.5 times larger than its entire GDP when all goods passing through the port are counted.

So when idle container vessels, their hulls so empty they bobbed atop the sea like bath toys, began to gather in the Singapore Strait in late 2008, local leaders feared the worst: that a synchronized collapse in global trade would crush the tiny trade-dependent island. The government's economic forecasts were revised downward three times in less than six months. By mid-April the Ministry of Trade and Industry was predicting a record-breaking contraction of up to 9% for 2009. By that point Singapore's benchmark Straits Times stock index had plummeted 60% below its 2007 peak. Property prices tanked 25%. The situation appeared worrying enough for the government to create a 25-member Economic Strategies Committee to assess the basic soundness of Singapore's economic model. (See the worst business deals of 2008.)

Almost five months later, such alarm appears overdone. GDP in the second quarter soared 20.7% compared with figures for the first three months of 2009. Citigroup economist Kit Wei Zheng now expects at worst a 2.7% contraction for Singapore for 2009. "If you look at the headline economic numbers, like the fall in exports or GDP, this recession seemed severe," says Kit. "But closer to the ground [it has] been quite mild." Singapore's stock market is up more than 70% from its April lows.

The vigor and speed of Singapore's rebound underscore two important facts about its economy. Like others in Asia, Singapore is turning increasingly to trade with China and India to fill the hole left by the collapse in demand from Western consumers. And Singapore, perhaps more adroitly than other Asian countries, is promoting domestic consumption by its cash-rich citizens to help balance an economy that had become dangerously reliant upon external demand for growth.

Not that the city-state is turning its back on globalization — it has just shifted its gaze. China is now Singapore's third largest trading partner after Malaysia and the E.U. More important, an increasing chunk of Singapore's exports to the mainland are directly linked to Chinese domestic consumption instead of to components that are merely re-exported to the West. Citigroup estimates that exports directly linked to Chinese domestic demand account for around 3.9% of Singapore's GDP. "What a crisis like this forces you to do is to broaden your base," says Gautam Banerjee, executive chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Singapore and one of the members of the government's Economic Strategies Committee. "We've stepped up our engagement with China and that will continue."

Singapore has been cozying up to India as well. Bilateral trade between India and Singapore in 2008 amounted to $19.2 billion, a fifth more than the previous year's amount. More astonishingly, that same year Singapore was the second largest foreign direct investor in India, pouring in $3.76 billion. At the same time, Singapore has become a magnet for a new breed of entrepreneurial Indian company, thousands of which are now being welcomed to the city's shores.

One of these is the Professional Couriers, an Indian parcel service that has made Singapore its Southeast Asia logistics hub. A blue chip it isn't. But what the company lacks in gravitas it makes up for in entrepreneurial energy. "More Indian companies want to develop a global footprint and it's much easier to do that from Singapore," says Pradeep Menon, chief executive of the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce, citing the island's superior air and telecommunications links to the rest of Asia and its advantages as a financial hub.

Singapore's tiny size (2008 pop. 4.84 million) has traditionally been its greatest economic vulnerability. Add to that an almost complete absence of natural resources, and Singapore was left little choice but to trade its way to prosperity — a realization its first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, came to as far back as the late 1960s, when a commitment to free trade was unfashionable in the developing world. (See pictures of the recession of 1958.)

But after more than four decades of trade-driven growth, Singapore has found that its relatively wealthy citizens can now help to provide the economic cushion it lacked at its independence in 1965. According to Singapore's Department of Statistics, the average income per working household member has grown 5.5% over the past three years, to $1,652 a month or roughly $20,000 a year. A stunning 84% of Singapore's citizens live in subsidized public-housing estates, which keeps the cost of living and mortgages low. And because most large Singapore companies have so far refrained from mass layoffs, unemployment in Singapore, at just 3.3%, remains enviably low. Citigroup's Kit points out that though 18,600 jobs were lost in Singapore in the first half of 2009, that's less than half the the number lost at similar stages of recessions in 1997 and 2001.

That's why, despite the recession, ordinary Singaporeans have more cash in their pockets to spend than debt-burdened Americans or jobless Europeans. Inside the Harry Winston luxury-jewelry store in a mall on Orchard Road, a pear-shaped $5.3 million diamond ring has been pulling customers through the shop's bulletproof doors. Although nobody has yet snapped up the ring, Ginny Ng, managing director of Harry Winston in Singapore, says with a shrug, "I don't feel the global recession here."

Singaporeans have also continued to spend because they still feel like they are getting ahead in the world rather than losing ground. According to Citigroup, the total value of assets held by the average household has increased by almost 60% since 2000 despite the recent downturn. "Singapore households have always had a strong balance sheet, but what they lacked before was confidence," says Mark Matthews, chief strategist for Asia at Fox-Pitt Kelton Securities in Hong Kong. "Now they are confident."

To be sure, Singapore can't isolate itself from the economies of the U.S. and Europe and expect to prosper. The sea lanes around Singapore, once dotted with three-masted clippers bearing tea and silver, and crowded today with oil tankers and container vessels, will be as vital to Singapore's economic future as they have been for its past. "We have to export," says Banerjee of PricewaterhouseCoopers. But by shifting its nautical gaze from West to East, as well as looking inward, Singapore may be charting a new economic course for the rest of Asia.