Recently, I watched on the state-media mainstream news featuring MM Lee speaking about the GIC losses, not sure what event it was but with lots of camera focus on the ang mohs listening to our God-like leader with smiles and nods. I do not know why it felt like they were going.."Yah yah, I also did not see it coming, but I am glad I have my million dollars salary and my mega-millions more bonuses in my swiss account and my very own private island already!" or in local terms, the ang mohs seem to be saying "Buy ah, Buy ah..don't buy don't have already!" A common term heard between my friends as they urge each stupid question like "DBS $8.50 very cheap ah, should I buy?" - It is now at this moment priced at $6.92 cents, ~20% drop. And Citibank is priced just a tad over $1 and it is reported that the GIC converted its preferred notes at a price of $3.25 per share. Wow...what an astute move which I guess we just lost 2/3 of its value.
’We became cash-rich and when the market fell, we went into UBS and Citi,’ he said. ‘But we went in too early. That’s part of the ride.’
‘How could we have known this was the extent of the damage? You look at all the big-name banks - they have gone down, misjudged the situation, ruined their careers,’
- our highly esteemed octogenerian politician Lee said.
So really why do I need to pay you those millions again? Maybe I should be thankful that we did not end up
like Iceland, whose country debt is 850 percent of GDP. This tiny fishing nation, of population 300,000 citizens suddenly woke up and found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child.
Oh maybe we should be thankful we are not in a dire straits as debt-drowned United States which has reached just 350 percent of GDP equivalent of debts. Which is about 6.4 trillion and national debt equates to USD$30,400 per American person, or USD$60,100 per head of the U.S. working population as of February 2008.
Well, in any case. I am not sure if I felt responsible for the estimated $100 billion lost in both GIC and Temasek. That is equivalent to about $20,663 for every single living person in Singapore (4.84mil); or $27,452 for every Singapore Residents (Singapore Citizens 3.16mil + PR 478k); or $33,806 for every employed person in Singapore. Numbers which I can relate to as I am included in that statistic.
Astounding numbers henceforth, is if we just blame the government officials for it - 93 MPs + 1 ribbon-cutting-key holder Head of state - that is about
$1.06 billion per government official. But to be fair, we should throw in the 350 or so Temasek employees and board of directors + GIC's 1000 staff worldwide. That should be more accountable, they lost only
$69.3million per person.
And to think we pay some of these jokers 300k a month who constantly have been telling the people to shut the f*^k up and let them do their thing, f@$k transparency, f#*k accountability - can eat one huh? Well eat these numbers!
Many have seen this coming, countless of warnings by many people, hell! books are written foretelling this crisis. Maybe its time we start interviewing these gurus if they would like to be paid $300k/mth and get nice colonial rental houses with pools. I really wonder if the our elite scholars deserve the recognition and power they have so far. I personally would rather have someone who knows what he is doing, reporting to me with full transparency where his knowledge would actually make $. And unlike those ignorant fools who feel so freely dispensing our hard-earned reserves - that is unless those reserves are already treated like spare loose change of their own pockets.
This is all based on
mid-year 2008 estimates and the various Temasek and GIC websites.
