TR EMERITUS

This report is totally irrelevant! When we are talking about vaccination (V) for pregnant women, it is not about mild side effects anymore. We are more concerned about safety of the V to the babies instead! The comparison between V non pregnant women vs V pregnant women is TOTALLY irrelevant! The correct study should be comparison between UnV women vs V pregnant women, which group has higher rate of still birth, perinatal mortality, neonatal mortality as well as infant mortality! If everyone is vaccinated, then the only proper way to make comparisons is to compare pre V period vs post V period. The latest data is out for SG and it is kind of worrying. Click to enlarge Live births have dropped for the past months. Still Births has shot through abnormal zone... Hope this trend doesn't become the norm.     Goh Meng Seng            Read More →

It was Singapore’s 57th birthday on August 9. As always, there was a spectacular parade, which as per the usual was a chance for the military to show off its latest toys (our toys are considered the best in the region) and to perform great feats of marching (A former Canadian army officer described our marching as “perfect”) and there are other feats of song and dance. The evening inevitably ends off with fireworks. I grew up watching the parade and I guess the parade became even more significant to me when I moved back from the UK to serve national service. This was what you would call my first encounter with “real” Singapore and although I am terrible at drill (I don’t have a sense of rhythm and I have an even worse sense of “marching in a group”), there is something incredibly special about hearing drill commands and watching other people do drill. However, whilst I find it significant to watch the military portion of the parade, I have felt the need to question the purpose of National Day. In a way, National Day has become something like Valentine’s Day. Why do you need a special day to be reminded to love your country when you should be loving your country every day? Although I try to avoid criticising the parade itself (I know how hard the contingents work to put on a good show), I do question why we need a grand parade to show that we love the country. I, like everyone else holding a little red passport, should feel an emotional connection to the country regardless of whether we have a parade or not. The issue of “feeling Singaporean” has become especially pertinent in the last two decades. New arrivals from other parts of Asia have gotten many of us to ask ourselves about what our nationality means to us. I have said it many times before, Singapore seems to be the only place better loved by people from elsewhere than the native-born. I live it. My Vietnamese wife thinks Singapore is heaven on earth and spends her days telling me that I need to do more to keep the world’s best government happy (pay more taxes). My daughter, who is naturalised Singaporean, accepts that its easier to travel the world on a Singapore passport when compared to a Vietnamese one, but does not seem to have an emotional connection to the place. I get why many of our foreign arrivals love the place. As I have often been reminded by people from America and Western Europe – Singapore is clean, green, safe, and rich. What is there not to like? While I see all these things, I ask myself if its possible to be drawn to the place even if it was not all these things. I cannot explain it, but I feel it, especially when the National Anthem is played. I am part of “gen-x” of the generation born after 1965. I am part of a generation that that has never known Singapore as anything other than an independent sovereign state. The only national anthem I have ever known is “Majulah Singapura.” This was the national anthem that I sung when I went to school. By comparison, my mother, who is a “boomer” sang “God Save the Queen” when she was at school in Singapore (When Singapore was a Crown Colony). While I am from the generation that has only known “Majulah Singapura” as a national anthem, I am also of the generation where Malay ceased to be part of the common language of the streets. I speak English, which is the working language of Singapore. If push comes to shove, I can communicate in Mandarin and Cantonese (Mandarin being the language our first Prime Minister said defined Chinese and Cantonese being what I spoke to my paternal grandma in). Malay, our national language, has for our Chinese majority society, become the language for drill commands in the army. So, I have utterly no idea of what “my” national anthem means. I only knew that “Majulah Singapura” only meant “On ward Singapore” when I was well into my thirties. As far as I know, there is an “Onward Singapore” and a reference to “Nanyang” which as far as I know, is the reference to a Chinese majority island in Southeast Asia. Other than that, I have utterly no idea what my national anthem means. Yet, while I do not know what my national anthem means, I would not want it to be otherwise. While I may not know what the lyrics of “Majulah Singapura” mean, I feel a connection to the very lyrics of the National Anthem. I guess the connection you feel to the nation is not something that can be explained rationally but its part of you. I do not think I am the only one who feels this way. [LINK] I remember there was once a discussion about changing the National Anthem to English. It felt like a violation. As one of my good friends (who is local Tamil) said “My national anthem is in Malay. You change my national anthem over my dead body.” Here’s an English translation of “Majulah Singapura.” [LINK] Click to enlarge I have argued that change is a constant. Cultures change and we should not be afraid of how things evolve. You cannot expect the demographics of Singapore in 2022 to be the same as the demographics in 1965. The aspirations of people in 2022 should have evolved away from the aspirations and needs of 1965. However, there are certain things that are part of us, and we should accept that too. Majulah Singapura is a part of us. Just as I cannot tell you what the words mean, I can tell you that hearing the national anthem gives me a feeling of belonging to the place. The technocrats need to understand that our social fabric is based on feeing as much as it is on technicalities. Being Singaporean is not something that can be measured but it is something that can be felt.   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →

The Government announced and state media reported that the economy had grown by 4.4% in the second quarter on a year-on-year basis. This was itself a slowdown from the advance estimate of 4.8% announced in July though of course the downward revision was not admitted in the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) press release. To paint a rosier picture, MTI said this was faster than the 3.8% growth recorded in the first quarter. However reading a little further I discovered that far from growth having accelerated in the second quarter, it was actually negative. On a month-on-month seasonally adjusted annualized basis the economy contracted by 0.2% . This should have been the significant news since it is a snapshot of how the economy is actually doing now rather than compared with the past. The figure of 4.4% is particularly misleading because there was a “circuit breaker” (the PAP’s euphemism for lockdown) during the second quarter of 2021. One of the benefits of having an independent media, whose duty is to hold the country’s leaders accountable rather than to ensure that they remain in office enriching themselves with millions of taxpayers’ funds and passing out plum jobs to their children, spouses and relatives, then the negative growth would have been highlighted as it has been in the UK (where the economy contracted by 0.1% in the same period, a better performance than Singapore). and in the US. Furthermore our Statistics Department is just part of MTI and not independent like in the UK, where by law the Office for National Statistics is separate from the Government. However the fake presentation to make growth look much better than it is appears to be only scratching the surface of the manipulation that is going on at MTI. Economic growth since 2019 has been largely driven by manufacturing, with increases in manufacturing output accounting for 132% of the growth in the economy. This of course means that if we exclude manufacturing the economy would be smaller today than it was in 2019. Never mind the fact that manufacturing employs relatively few Singaporeans, from executive to factory floor level, even though many of the foreign executives may subsequently be fast tracked to citizenship without the inconvenience of having to serve NS like ordinary SIngaporeans. Never mind the fact that the sector is largely foreign owned and its huge growth is likely only the result of enormous subsidies and zero tax concessions given by the PAP. In fact some of its output may be illusory and a transfer pricing exercise by MNCs from (relatively)high tax jurisdictions to low tax ones. Ireland has enjoyed enormous growth as well as a result of these fake tax accounting shenanigans without much impact on the real economy and the living standards of the Irish people. Similarly SIngaporeans do not see much benefit from this growth in manufacturing output in terms of jobs or income. The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted the growth of high tech manufacturing in Singapore while pointing out it employed relatively few people and omitting to mention the subsidies and tax benefits that must be necessary to induce MNCs to build their factories here rather than in the US or Europe. However that is not the end of the story. I dug a little deeper and found some puzzling anomalies. MTI uses 2015 prices to calculate real GDP. I looked at the figures for current GDP and GDP calculated using “chained” 2015 prices. For instance, comparing 2021 with 2019 (the last year before the pandemic) GDP at current market prices was 4% higher but when measured at 2015 prices was only 3% higher. However when I looked at manufacturing these figures were reversed. At current prices the manufacturing sector had grown by 12.9% whereas using 2015 prices manufacturing had grown by a whopping 21,7%, nearly 9% faster. Using MTI’s 2015 prices therefore may be making manufacturing’s growth appear much higher than it really is and masking negative growth in the rest of the economy. It is usual for prices of manufactured goods, where there are economies of scale, to fall relative to services, where the scope for productivity improvements has historically been much less. Economists also try to capture the hidden growth coming from the fact that manufactured goods today will likely be of higher quality or have extra features compared to those in the past through what are called ‘hedonic’ indices. But the scale of the difference in only seven years leads me to suspect that something fishy is going on and we should be wary of PAP claims of rapid economic growth and rising real wages when evidence to the contrary is all around us. In fact if we used 2022 prices which would give a lower weight to manufacturing then it is possible that real economic growth since 2019 has been negative and especially so if we look at the part of the economy excluding manufacturing. It appears that all economic growth is now coming from manufacturing and that this growth in fact is highly inflated. Using 2015 prices, manufacturing has expanded its share of the economy from 20% to 23% over the last two years but at current prices the share is nearly 2% lower. We would like an explanation and justification from MTI for what appear to be serious discrepancies that call into question the Government’s triumphalism. However, given Lawrence Wong’s failure to answer my questions about discrepancies in the Budget, I will be long dead and Singapore will have vanished below rising sea levels before I receive an answer.. The true figures for GDP growth , like the fake Budget expenditure figures , the Net Investment Returns Contributions that do not really exist, and the theoretically enormous reserves that strangely never benefit Singaporeans are just a few of the mysteries that we need answers to. My dear late father was fond of the quote from John 8:32 , “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. Perhaps one day Singaporeans will elect MPs who will demand answers to these fundamental questions, rather than ones who tiptoe around Parliament fearful of offending LHL, and by so doing at last achieve their freedom.   Kenneth Jeyaretnam   I’m a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That’s why I’ve never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I’m quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don’t work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I’m a liberal. I’m not sure what the middle think of me. I don’t think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I’m a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I’m not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean.      Read More →