Sunday 1 February 2015

Singapore Reform Party: A broken record ...

Singapore Reform Party Kenneth Jeyaretnam

SINGAPORE. On 31 January 2015, Kenneth Jeyaretnam of the Reform Party, posted an article on his blog Sonofadud giving his perspective on the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) recent decision to loosen its monetary policy.

Kenneth started out his article logically by explaining why he thought the move was "bad for Singaporeans" using Keynesian economics. While Keynesian economics served as the standard economic model for developed nations during the later part of the Great DepressionWorld War II, and the post-war economic expansion (1945–1973), it has however since lost its influence over leading economists following the oil shock and resulting stagflation of the 1970s. We however cannot fault Kenneth Jeyaretnam for his outdated thinking.

What we however found disappointing, is that towards the end of his article, Kenneth Jeyaretnam digressed and claimed that the real reason for the loosening of Singapore's monetary policy was to allow PM Lee and his wife Ho Ching to reap bigger bonuses. According to Kenneth, a weakening of the Singapore dollar would raise the book value of GIC and Temasek overseas assets, which would in return justify them being paid higher performance bonuses.

At SG General Election, we believe that people will always see what they want to see. Hence, given Kenneth's bias towards anything PAP, we doubt that his thoughts are objective and thus cannot be given any credence. This is a pity, as Kenneth Jeyaretnam seems like an intelligent man.

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