Thursday, June 18, 2009

Create jobs to spur economic recovery

Do you agree with the suggestion in this article? Give your views here.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Office Staff in Ang Mo Kio office

I wish to employ an office staff to do admin work. The office is in Ang Mo Kio. The work can be for 4 to 8 hours a day (flexible). Preference to someone living in or near Ang Mo Kio (or 1 direct bus). Interested, please send resume to kinlian@gmail.com.

TKL Intelligence Quiz, Sudoku

I have received two orders for my TKL Intelligence Quiz book through my website. The books will be mailed, free of postage, to an address in Singapore. This is a new way of selling books, which I am experimenting with. I also have a book on TKL Sudoku ($7.90). It contain challenging puzzles.

More orders are welcomed.

Obama's plan for Financial Regulatory Reform

Here are the details of the plan.

Someone said: If USA, which is the center of capitalism, finds it necessary to regulate the financial system, what about the rest of the world?

Obama to Create Consumer Financial Agency

President Obama has the courage to do what needs to be done. He is creating a Consumer Financial Agency with powers to punish wrong doings by financial institutions. Read this report.

Reckless behaviour by financial institutions

In the early 1990s, several insurance companies in Scandinavia lost a lot of money on credit insurance. They insured financial institutions from losses on mortgages in the event that the borrower did not pay back the loan. During the economic recession, the property values fell and many borrowers defaulted. These insurance companies had to be recapitalised.

15 years later, other insuranced companies have started to issue credit default swaps. They are like the credit insurance, except that the magnitude of the bets are of an unimaginable scale and they are unregulated entirely.

Could the insurers have forgotten the lessons of the 1990s? I do not think so. These new gamblers are either arrogant (i.e. they think that they found a new way to manage the risk) or reckless (i.e. they wanted to make a lot of profit now, and let the system collapse later).

The regulators were also negligent in not stopping these reckless bets.

Tan Kin Lian

Survey: Singapore political system

Give your views here.

Here are the survey results (based on 54 replies)