Current Economic News
Five Major Failures Of Singapore
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Addicted to sex – Illness or Excuse (Sunday Times 7 Mar)
Sex addiction was a term bandied around when it came to light that top-ranked golfer Tiger Woods had had a string of affairs behind his wife’s back and was receiving therapy at a sex addiction centre.
But in an article last month on American news website The Daily Beast, psychiatrist T. Byram Karasu from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Centre in New York rejected the popular diagnosis.
He urged people to stop treating every human behaviour, including male libido, as an illness or a medical disorder.
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Singapore is the only oddball developed country without any minimum wage protection!
- Australia – 543.78 Australian dollars per week; set federally by the Australian Fair Pay Commission[4]
- Austria – the accepted unofficial annual minimum wage is €12,000 to €14,000[4]
- Belgium – €1,387.49 a month for workers 21 years of age and over; €1,424.31 a month for workers 21 and a half years of age, with six months of service; €1,440.67 a month for workers 22 years of age, with 12 months of service; coupled with extensive social benefits[4][7]
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Singapore: A Cheap Play On Asian Growth (Moneyweek)
By Cris Sholto Heaton Mar 01, 2010
“Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” is the most boring headline of all time, according to Newsweek magazine. But “Singapore’s budget focuses on productivity” would surely give it a run for its money.
The city-state’s new blueprint for its future isn’t what you’d call a riveting read. And it probably won’t achieve much. It promises S$5bn in government cash to make the economy run more efficiently. But whatever politicians do, Singapore will remain one of the world’s oddest countries.
It’s a strange blend of capitalism and centralised power. The state indirectly accounts for around 60% of GDP. Micro-managed and authoritarian, it’s not somewhere I’d want to live.
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2010 Salary Review Report On Singapore (Robert Walters)
Singapore experienced a turbulent year in 2009 with many sectors dramatically affected by the global financial crisis. Banking and financial services was affected across all functions and levels, with trading activity particularly low at the start of the year. We saw dramatic headcount reductions in structured products and retrenchments prevalent within finance, product control and operations – traditionally strong areas within the Singapore market. Consequently, the emphasis on equities and commodities resulted in a shortage of talent in these areas.
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Singapore may take a decade to recoup its loss on UBS (Bloomberg 2 Mar)
March 2 (Bloomberg) — It took the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. three days in 2007 to agree to prop up UBS AG, ailing from subprime losses. It may take a decade to recoup that investment of 11 billion Swiss francs ($10 billion).
GIC, manager of more than $100 billion of the city-state’s foreign reserves, faces a paper loss of about 5.6 billion francs when it becomes the biggest shareholder of UBS on March 5, as shares of Switzerland’s largest bank trade at a third of the conversion price on notes it holds.
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Eight Reasons Why Foreign Workers Are Preferred Over Local Ones
When the Singapore government decides to ease the regulations in having more foreign workers few years ago so that employers can fill up those job vacancies, there was much cheer and giety. It was a roaring Singapore before the financial crisis hit in 2007 and everyone felt that this was the right thing to do. There was also full employment and no one paid the matter any attention then. No one also really knows how many foreigner imports will be let in until they saw the congested trains and swarmed shopping malls. Singapore is not the same again after 2005…
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What works better for PMETs (Today 1 Mar)
SINGAPORE – For the very low-skilled, older and low-wage workers, there is this assurance: A training scheme is being devised.
But what productivity training is in store for rank-and-file workers as well as Professionals, Managers, Executives and Technicians (PMETs)?
The two groups formed two-third and one-third respectively of the take-up for the $650-million Skills Programme for Upgrading and Resilience (Spur), which ends in November – and there was no mention in the Government’s Budget speech last week that it would be extended.
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Housing in Singapore Still Affordable (ST 27 Feb)
HOUSING is a perennial hot topic of discussion, especially in Singapore where it touches almost every segment of society – from the low to middle income in public housing to the middle and higher income aspiring to upgrade to private property.
The recent spikes in both public and private housing prices have added fuel to the debate on affordability. Analysts and experts have attributed the price increase to a rise in demand, especially from foreigners and permanent residents.
What is clear is that housing demand changes constantly, which means that government policies seeking to offer decent and affordable homes have to keep changing too.
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S’porean used fake degree to masquerade as doctor (ST 27 Feb)
Feb 27, 2010
S’porean used fake degree to masquerade as doctor
A SINGAPOREAN has been arrested in Australia for using a fake degree to masquerade as a doctor.
The 29-year-old is believed to have dropped out of the University of Adelaide’s medical programme.
But that apparently did not stop him from getting an internship last May at the Alice Springs Hospital, where he worked until his arrest on Wednesday.
The truth finally came to light when senior doctors supervising him became concerned over his performance and checked with the University of Adelaide.
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China Is Still The Best Place To Find A Job (Jobs In China)
China Is Still The Best Place To Find A Job
October 9th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin
I said way back in December that expats are better off looking for a job in China than they would be back in their home lands. That obviously still holds true as the Huffington Post has just written an article titled Young Americans Going To China For Jobs.
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Housing woes for a PR (Who moved my Singapore Cheese 25 Feb)
Housing woes for a PR
Woke up this morning to this piece of news…heard from my mother, the unofficial broadcaster of all family news, that one of my uncles, a Malaysian PR living in Singapore for the past 15years, decided to give up waiting for the housing prices to turn south and jumped into the resale market as rental costs continue to price him and his wife out. They used to rent a whole HDB unit but now can only afford to rent a room in a HDB flat; with new measures taken by the government, in what can only be seen as “too little too late”, to cool the housing market, he is now required to pay up to 20% downpayment for this flat purchase. They are afraid of any further measures taken against PR’s favor and so they are jumping in quicker than they can think. They paid their option deposit to the real estate agent and are now desperately going around the extended family looking for loans to help them with the $40,000 cash shortfall required for down-payment and other costs such as stamp fees and real estate agent fee.
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Ten Reasons Why PAP May Lose More Seats In The Next Election
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Productivity and Singapore’s economic growth model (furry brown dog)
Productivity and Singapore’s economic growth model
In 1994, 2008 economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman penned an article titled The Myth of Asia’s Miracle in Foreign Affairs, an American magazine founded by the CFR. In the article, Krugman lambasted the East Asian economic growth model, characterising it as input-driven primarily by increasing capital and labour contributions rather than growth in total factor productivity (TFP). The East Asian nations the Western press was so fond of as hyping as the industrious Asian Tigers, Krugman warned, was at risk of a protracted economic slowdown not unlike what transpired in Japan in 1989.
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Too early to assess impact of casinos
Feb 9, 2010
Too early to assess impact of casinos
