Lion Ill-Advised To Beg on Tiger's Behalf

Like recently heading to L'Elysée for a godi or asking for scholarships and brains in Singapore. And whilst it's nice that India has drawn a map of our exclusive economic zone for free we're rich enough to pay for it and for everything else that we need to swiftly get our main national problems out of the way.

Yep, we must be quite rich and particularly crazy for having contracted Rs9 billion of foreign debt we don't need from the World Bank. Any guess how much interest we've been paying to this loan shark since 2006?

Tiger Ready To Pounce, Again

Indeed Singapore's economy clocked a 14.9% growth in the third quarter after expanding at the impressive clip of 22.0% in the preceding one. Although that will be insufficient from preventing the economy from contracting between 2% and 2.5% in 2009 you can bet which Tiger will leap furthest once the world economy start picking up again.

The prognosis for the Tiger-wannabe is of course entirely different. The crisis we're in here has been created by the toxic policies of Sithanen and Mansoor. So that as long as they gonna be around we're not going to go anywhere.

Once a Tiger, Always a Tiger

Yep. I am looking at a 16-year span in the life of Panthera Tigris:

Period I (1987-1996): Exports increased by 2.86 times while the Singapore dollar appreciated by 50% with respect to the USD. In fact, exports and the Singapore dollar rose every single year.

Period II (1997-2002): Exports keep on increasing to reach 3.78 times their 1987 levels in 2002 while the Singapore dollar is about 22% lower than its 1996 level but is still close to 18% higher than its 1987 mark. Of course, during that period, Singapore went through two major and real storms: the Asian crisis and the SARS outbreak.

And at the end of 2008 the Singapore dollar was almost back to a 20-year high while exports increased by an additional one-third over its 2002 levels.