Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong asked Singaporeans to brace for tough times. The PM says that Singapore’s economy will contract between 2 to 5% as Singapore’s export markets are all suffering from recession.
All good and fine, but I want to know what strategy the Singapore government has to get ourselves out of this quagmire. Everywhere else in the world, countries are implanting ways to bring their economy out of trouble. The Obama Administration in the U.S has a trillion dollars stimulus package, the Chinese government lend money to their SMEs (small-medium enterprise), and even our neighbour Indonesia has a plan to focus on their raw materials as an engine of growth. Singapore’s plan however seems to consist of praying for the U.S economy to turn around.
Like other export-reliant Asian economies, Singapore has been hard hit by the collapse in consumer demand as economies slow sharply around the world. Just look at the waters to the south of our island and you will see container ships and tankers just parked there. It’s all fine and well for our PM to say that times would be tough for Singapore and Singaporeans need to bunker down, but I would feel much more comfortable if they can come up with a strategy that consist of more than praying for other countries to do the work for them.
4 comments:
Praying is good.
Doing nothing is better than ... say ... investing yet another equity fund ... oh wait ...
Do nothing and stilll earn world highest ministerial pay, of cos just pray and do nothing lor. Dont forget LHL and half of his cabinet of paper generals are after all SAF-trained.
This reminds me of this old joke of a warning issued just before a plane crash...
"Please bend forward and put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good bye"
Jokes aside - I still can't understand how the good things (strong GDP growth etc) are credited to the gahmen but bad things are always due to external factors?!
Doesn't it cut both ways?
Take the good and the bad on outsiders is normal. I don't blame them for that.
The main problem I has is this tagging of ours to the U.S. The American economy is not expected to recover till 2010 at best! So that means 2009, and 2010 are all gone for Singapore. That's just not right to me.
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