The Uselessness of Predictions

Whole industries have sprung up over the centuries for the mere purpose of predicting the future, from the vestal virgins of Delphi and witches of Scotland to star gazers, face/palm/foot readers, statistical manipulators, scientific safeguarders, trend discerners and inspired third-sense charlatans.

When all potential faults and problems are properly identified and resolved, everything goes on so smoothly that it is presumed that that which have been hard at work and keeping everything in tip-top condition are but irritations because of their apparent presumed self-importance which is making the incompetents extremely insecure and jealous.

There is really no reward in forecasting except when one is making plans for one's own life journey. Even then, there are those who argue that there is no need for planning and everything will end up in the best of all possible worlds, so long as we accept whatever comes. For those who have no experiences of good things coming by themselves on their own accord, without effort on one's part, this is an uneasy and possibly traumatic attempt at relaxation. In an organisation or society, the politicians will always short-change the technical people in order to exert control over the experts. Under such repressive conditions, it is likely that the technical upkeep may just be a notch below the necessary as a form of sabotage in retaliation to presumed injustice. Such perverse behaviour may even be observed in children when they underperform in order to hurt their parents. First hand, I tend to try to identify potential problems long before they surface, so that easier milder remedial actions can be applied earlier, but have more often than not been labelled as a person who sees problems where none exist (for the moment). My standard response is this: "I hope I am wrong. If I am not, you are in deep trouble."

But there are things in life that are self-evident who do not need a rocket scientist to predict and which every sensible ordinary person with some common sense will tell you will happen, as a matter of fact: (1) You will die. (2) Human beings will disappear from earth, just as dinosaurs had. (3) You make bombs, bombs kill people. (4) Nuclear plants will blow up.

For natural phenomena such as (1) and (2), there is nothing much that one can do except to accept the inevitable, although most of us will still try to stretch things at the margin just a little more (just like home renovation). You find people popping pills (me included), exercise, and resorting to all kinds of activities of some sort, wasting time in the hope of gaining some, which is nothing but the swapping of young energetic time for a longer weak and frail condition.

Man-made phenomena such as (3) and (4) are simply the foolishness of human beings, of a small group of people harming the whole of mankind just because society at large allow a few foolish people to take control over the majority just because the few claims to have the right or sheer brute force to exert that power.

Will there ever be wisdom at the top, when the foolish thinks that status and position bestow upon them wisdom which they do not possess. The jostling for power and the scrambling for titles are things that foolish people do to feel self important. Even erstwhile perfectly good individuals when they are feeling ordinary and are wise seem to have lost their wits the moment they enter halls of "monumental historical importance." When they do not deserve the position, we will find that they generally will destroy the sacredness of the place through the corruption of its integrity.

Because of the foolishness of individuals, we can only allow each individual a short period of time of time to display their foolish the moment they step into power.

Zen & The Japanese

How do the simple teachings of the correct method of realigning one's psyche to the cosmos by a foreign teacher in a foreign land can so readily be accepted by the xenophobic Japanese who then made them distinctively their own? Is it because those teachings fit exactly into the Japanese shared experience of Earth and how Mother Nature can both be giving and neutral.

Zen is the end-result of the teachings of a 6th century master who went to China to correct the way for practicising Buddhism. There was much doggedness and flippancy, and the way out was flexibility and focus. That flexibility which juxtaposes prolonged silent sitting with controlled focused movement and the later gives rise to the famous Shaolin monks. The focus is made in all conscious efforts, whether it be sitting or moving, and the first trick is to understand and accept what comes without acting further to aggravate the situation, and the final trick is to understand that it is all in the mind and nothing else which could in modern science be simply called "neutral".

The big name in Chan is Huineng who was a butcher who left his poor old mother to the care of neighbours in order to work in the kitchen of the temple. Huineng demonstrated his understanding with a few lines on the wall scribbled in the middle of the night, whose handwriting the master recognised who then gave him the authority to be the next master and told to leave the temple immediately that very night so that the competitor could not kill him. From Huineng arose several schools of Chan, and it was the Linzi school which probably had had the biggest influence on the Japanese, who enunciated it as "Zen". I highlighted Linzi because it is the school which beats its disciples with a stick during meditation if the master finds the disciples to be drifting.

The Japanese make a big deal out of Zen because they are perfectionist. If they really want to be "truly unperturbed" they must make a real effort in a equal and opposite response to what must have been a terrible environment for them - the warlords, the serfdom, the fightings and wars, and servitude in addition to natural calamities such as volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

The extreme nature of Japanese stoic-ness could be a Malaysian perspective, as we tend to be soft and forgiving, not only to others but particularly to ourselves and our communities. Everything seems to be an excuse for a good giggle.

In Zen, the final lesson is this: In the face of even the most unpleasant external environment, the only response is not to respond. "Be a stone", as an ex-Japan resident used to tell me. Keep still, do not react, do not retaliate - not only in body, but also in mind and spirit and soul.

I think it was only with the deepest inability to contain his emotion when the Governor of Fukushima, Yuhei Sato, said on national television on 16th March 2011, "The worry and anger of the people of Fukushima has been pushed to the limit." This is very unZen-like, but how poignant.

The Liquidity Trap & How To Fund Spending

Economic theory has advanced so much that the Keynesian-Monetarist dichotomy is blurred. Economists today can think freely about fiscal policy (with monetary implications) and monetary policy (with fiscal implications) interchangebly. In the end, spending and pumping money into the system are quite the same however you dice it. The illumination from Keynes has been to be able to accept deficit-spending as a way forward. The unfortunate thing is that Keynesian policy has reached its limits apparently, because of limits placed on government deficits by buyers of government debt. The Japanese answer to this debt limit is to bypass private debt purchasers and just ask the central bank to print.

But what I really want to discuss in this blog is Keynes' famous concept of the Liquidity Trap. This is economic psychology. The economic assumption has been that when people have money, they will either spend the money on food or buy a guitar or save it and invest it in bonds or equities or buy a house. Somehow, by putting more money into the system, people will spend or invest and somehow generate economic activity. Under normal circumstances, monetary policy works. By lowering the interest rate, people borrow more and spend and get the economy going. In the process, money is created.

The Liquidity Trap kicks in when people suddenly become fearful of the uncertain future, and they start holding onto cash. This happens they expect prices to fall - no point buying now when things can get cheaper later and get a bargain. The Liquidity Trap comes in when deflation is expected to happen or is already happening. It's like catching a falling knife. When there is a Liquidity Trap, lowering interest rates do not work to stimulate the economy and this is when governments have to spend and arrest the decline in prices.

For years, governments have been arguing for stimulus packages in order to kick start a depressed economy and get inflation going. This is jolly well and good. Now, the problem is when stimulus packages are no longer virgin policies and they have been used and abused for decades. Prices run off and people are happy making tons of money without too much hard labour except speculating on shares and properties in the comforts of a cozy office.

In the past, banks used to be responsible especially after having gone through the recession of the thirties and the inflation of the seventies. Banks were prudent and had their internal checks and balances. Most banks were owned by private individuals, with a personal stake in its fortune. By the eighties, many banks went from European/UK type to US type banking where the CEOs were and are just employees out to make a quick buck from their bonuses calculated on loan disbursed but not necessarily repaid. An untrained banker can become very rich by blindly giving out loans and targeting high loan growth. The only thing you need is a collateral and collaterals can be created everyday if you are giving out loans for properties.

When the game of rapid loan growth funding property purchases hit its limit when there are no more housebuyers, the mortgage market gets into trouble. Because deposits of the public is at stake, government stepped in to save banks and this can be done if the property market is not allowed to adjust downwards. Property prices are kept up and loans kept on the books but there is no extra cash to lend to other users like businesses. The banking system gets caught in a quagmire.

Governments print money to save banks from collapsing. There is no threat of inflation. In this case, there is a threat of deflation from property prices. It is this threat of asset deflation that is being used as a justification by central banks around the world to print more money in an effort to the save the economy.

With property asset prices being kept up, rental prices continue to be high. Housing prices remain unchanged; they may even rise as more money is being pumped into the system and banks try to show a profit with more loan growth. Those who do not own their homes still have to rent and pay high rentals. Businesses pay for high rentals of their shoplots. For the ordinary people, food prices continue to be high as the global commodity markets go crazy on biofuels and natural disasters as well as on sustained growth in China and India.

The unfortunate case of Japan today given the earthquake should give Malaysians a stark lesson in economic efficiency. It is really not a clever argument to say that economic efficiency is not important. The natural disaster requires that scarce resources of the Japan government has now got to be re-deployed into replacing what is lost rather than build more on what already exists. All additional resources will be used to recreate new towns and new villages and new facilities. But for the Japanese, all will not be lost. They will rebuilt a new system which will be far more superior from what they had lost. What they have now lost in structure will now be replaced with greater efficiency. Japan will recover, and it is the efficiency and determination of its people that they have my greatest respect as economic creatures.

Japan Earthquake & Tsunami: Does It All Matter Anymore?

To watch the unfolding of an on-going tragedy in the warmth of one's home is one of the most uncomfortable senses of being that I have ever experienced, so far. The tragedy that is hitting Japan today is a sad moment.

Christchurch and the other earthquake incidents were one-off. There was the quake, and a few tremors. Or, there was the tsunami, and all was gone. But to watch the earthquake and then the tsunami and then the unsteadiness of the nuclear plants and to see crowds of people with nowhere to go, hungry, cold and lost, and then to see the plain devastation of an entire village and town where thousands used to live and are there no more, that scene in my mind is the most heart wretching.

I watched the unfolding drama with my Japanese friend and his wife. They had the nervous laughter, unable to show their sadness in front of their guests, and forever trying to play the perfect host and hostess. Their two boys and a girl are in Tokyo and in the initial hours they could not keep contact. Finally, they found one son walking home seven kilometres, the daughter squeezing in among friends in fear, and the youngest son could only responded: "What, OK!" They have a fallout with their youngest son and my friend concluded that the one consolation of this disaster is that he and his wife could at the very least have some form of communication with their son.

I said to my youngest sister who I discovered has already passed forty when we were watching the tragedy on TV that this is a tragedy only because of the insignificance of the lives of human beings. The earth is nothing but a ball of fire and the other layer has cooled to form a crust which is in a constant state of flux, like the skull. The movement is constant, but in human terms, this is what the engineers called a once in a hundred year event. Well, if a moment for the earth is a hundred years for humans, then our individual lives do not last more than one moment each, in global terms, and probably far less than in cosmic terms. We are like insects that are born in the morning and die by night fall. And what do we do in this shortness of time. We fight, we lie, we cheat, we become generally unhappy with ourselves and everybody else. How silly are we all!

So, there is no big deal to this former prime minister of our who has again distinguished himself by writing a book of lies to justify his wrongdoings, and calling everybody else names. I have find it extremely unpleasant for supposed educated young and old men and women to degrade themselves as intellectual by extreme forms of arguments when good manners should have prevailed. Instead of focusing on the subject matter, they would focus on character assassination and calling people names. Sticking labels on people is one the easiest and lowest forms of human communication and I can see now where our young people are getting their bad manners from. Economists, unfortunately, have become extremely ill-mannered ever since Keynes published The General Theory. He argued that in order to get his argument across and to break through a tough convention, he had to be rude - in his words, to "convict" his opponent. Since then, economists have acquired very bad manners in their talking and writing. I have learned this little thing from my Malay colleagues when I was working in a major bank. The executive director told me: "You might be clever, but you must make people accept you first." I am eternally gratefully to this person, who unfortunately had fallen into disgrace due to his lack of good judgement in his work. If you want to know why economists do not agree, it is because they are rude, no matter how brainy they may imagine themselves to be.

So, what about the economy? I have refrained from making any comments on the economy because I have already said what I have wanted to say about it. The global economy stands in ruin because of the reckless pumping of fiat money by the irresponsible Fed of the US. That extra money is being used to keep its economy by the propagation of war around the world. The mountain of extra printed money flooded rapidly through the financial centres around the world making arrogant stockbrokers and bankers. They lend recklessly to speculators on real estate and financial assets. The pumping of more money to prevent these asset markets from correction and downward adjustment is now being lauded as the saviour of the global economy because economists do not have any new ideas to solve this economic disaster. Any correction of the asset markets would be a political and human disaster. The global economy now swims afloat a sea of greenbacks trying to find dry land. If the stock markets are recovering, do not believe that the global economy is recovering; it is bad money looking for good avenues to surface. In the meantime, China suffers from its own success and the world suffers from the scarce resources that China has the money to buy.

We know from history that the great wars are started by massive inflation especially with respect to food so that whoever or whatever promises to put on the tables of hungry fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, there is a revolution waiting to happen. China is not like the Middle East or the rest of the world, because China is communist and communists are supposed to live and die for the rakyat. China may yet find a narrow path out of the world of contending factions.

Inflation & System Change: No?

Regimes in the Middle East change because people are fed up with the same old politicians with their same old ideas of stability and making themselves rich while the rest of the people cannot find jobs or are in jobs with steady but low pay while food prices have skyrocketed.

Of course, the chief cause of very high food prices is the natural disasters and crop failures. There is a shortfall in the supply of food and prices rise to ration the supply to those who have the purchasing power to access the food. In other words, the supply of food in the world is now distributed more among the rich and away from the poor. (The poor even with their pooled resources would have have a limited access while the rest falls on the tables of the well-to-do.)

Does it help to restrain demand growth? If slower demand growth will create less jobs or less to higher unemployment, then the poor with continue to suffer. So long as there is a shorter of food supply, the rich will bid up the prices until they get the quantity they need. By slowing demand growth, if the slowdown is marginal, its impact will be much more severe on the poor (who have no cushion) than on the rich (who do not have a cushion problem).

The only way that prices can really adjust downwards is through a severe depression whereby not only the poor will be jobless with no cash but the so-called rich will be in trouble with their cashflows and their investments. Banks will also be in trouble again. This is a shock scenario which is unwarranted. The problem is a shortage in food supply and the solution is to replant the acres lost to the floods or weather. Time is the cure.

How ironic then that it is the weather and the floods that bring about the downfall of old regimes, as if it is the straw that broke the camel's back. It is as if the almighty has decided that the old regimes have stayed too long and decided to give the poor masses a helping hand. Would there be a new regime or an old regime in a new bag.

But didn't sustained rapid growth in the money supply of the reserve currency awakened the sleeping dragon which had slept for half a century, and decided that it will not go hungry any more. Surely China is big enough to absorb all the money that Greenspan could print at high speed for a decade or so - and China grew just as fast and as long. Along the way, short-term money flowed through all the financial markets around the world, awaking stockbrokers and the real estate markets, and everybody suddenly became rich and corrupt without much effort. No, of course, the growth of asset prices are consistent with so much percentage point growth per annum, while wages among manufacturers remained low thanks to the newcomers from China. Global wages threatened to adjust downward to Chinese levels - at least this was what MNCs threatened their workers outside China while Chinese workers apparently gladly suffered in silence of their newfound economic opportunities.

So much water had flowed under the bridge. The global economic depression that promised to surface didn't happen as Bernanke cleverly staved off the threat with extra cash. All nominal values stayed about the same, except for some unfortunate real estate but temporary. The world is saved from a horrible adjustment which had been sorely needed to readjust global and local economic power. Everything stayed the same more or less, except for the food prices, housing rentals, transport charges - all the things that a poor man and his family needs everyday.

Effecting Change: System vs System

When I was earning a living making forecasts, my emphasis was on forecasting turning points, not projecting straight lines. Projecting a straight line (in any form) is the dumbest thing a forecaster can do - the only judgement one can make is how straight is the straight line. One cannot really forecast a straight line; I contend we can merely project it. To me, a line will continue to be straight (or sort of) until something happens that causes it to go off its trajectory. Normally, people assume a straight projection (that life will go on as usual) until the expectation is proven to be wrong and then ask what happens. As forecasters, we have to know what are the key parameters which give rise to the existing situation, which key parameter is likely to change first and when that happens what happens next. In the mind of a forecaster, therefore, the main task is always to assess the integrity and condition of the key parameters as well as to look out for any extraneous factors that are likely to intrude into the system which will alter the whole picture. In the end, the quality of a forecast rests on judgement, based on the experience in the assigned field as well as the breadth and depth of knowledge of the world around him or her and us.

Living a good life is living a boring life, as boring as projecting a straight line. Same thing, day in and day out. Nature is boring. One can make one's life a bit more interesting with variations around the same theme. Today, I eat steak instead. The system does not change; our activities change. When the system is stable, we can dream - about how we are going to make progress in life through material acquisition so that we can show off to our friends and relatives - and we take our time trying to accomplish our vision and mission, step by each of our own slow and painful step. The system is in equilibrium, probably static equilibrium (in and around the same area more or less like some nomadic tribe in the jungle) and if lucky dynamic equilibrium with ability to accommodate population growth with sufficiency which in most societies is termed prosperity. Systemic equilibrium is crucial to happiness, no matter how much people may gripe about the ordinariness of everyday life which is really a liberty that only happy people can indulge. The English complain about the weather, and monks talk about the dreariness of mundane life.

Let us now introduce trauma, otherwise and now popularly known as change. We shake the tree vigorously and see what falls. We bonsai the branches by twisting and turning and telling people what they can and cannot do or how they should do things in order that we may create a brave new world by transfiguring the present. We imagine a better world, but we end up in the end with the same old dullness, sometimes kept interesting only by the unannounced potential threat to our soundness or mortality by some madman in power keen to stay in power forever, at whatever level of hierarchical structure that has somehow been erected all around us. In effecting change, the easiest way is to replace a lousy system with another lousy system. This is when reformers are unimaginative and uncreative. They see a lousy system, and wanting to replace it, end up giving the same lousy system except for some suggested modifications which hopefully give better results which did not quite materialise which then leads to another call for traumatic change and another sameness.

If therefore we are going to get the same system (albeit with modifications), we might as well determine what that core system is going to be and strengthen it. In most human systems, the core element is the absolute right of the individual and of all individuals, each same and equal in terms of right. The right to freely think and speak and associate and contract and exchange and indulge and believe and practice. The right to live as humans. The underlying structure of any human system must be founded on the recognition of these rights, and institutionalised. Once this core is corrupted, change will come after change. In order that the system will transition over time through the generations, this change can also be institutionalised so that not one person or a group of individuals can monopolised an entire generation. The call for change through rallies is usually a rally for generational change when an individual has been dominating an entire generation. In building in the required change and transition in the system, there will be scope for creativity in government when individuals or groups can propose newfangled ideas. In the end, however, when prosperity has been bestowed on the society, there will be fear over the protection of the people's assets and if the assets are not so fairly distributed, problems of the unemployed and the poor. The final battle in the capitalist world is always the fight between capital and labour.

Traumatic systematic changes are costly to social property or capital and they should be avoided if possible. If not, it may be the only way out. But there must always be a system to be put in place or else we will have no social cohesion.

Change: Breaking Point , Turning Point

Obama brought the word "change" to current circulation. meaning "revolution". He could have been inspired by the parking vending machine which says "change is possible". How does change occur?

In general, people do not like change because change implies uncertainty. As I understand it, the whole economic apparatus that people have erected around ourselves is to reduce uncertainty and to create stability of some sort. So long as the existing apparatus is still workable, people will maintain it until there is a critical mass of sufferers of the system who then demanded that change be made of the apparatus or system or paradigm.

We can see very clearly that political change will be brought about by the masses of ordinary people when their quiet suffering and despair could no longer be tolerated, when what they see around them is unbearable daily difficulties in the face of opulence - which indicates to them somehow that it is a systematic problem, not a natural problem. Nature can of course make things worse, but in a stable system natural calamities by themselves do not call for structural breaks as they create uncertainty; if they have faith, they want the system to help them, as is the case now in Australia with politicians shedding tears for ordinary people who are suffering from the natural disasters. It is when the prevailing system is seen to have lost its integrity which means that the integrity of the system has been corrupted that ordinary people rise to demand the obvious - that the system be improved or, better still, changed. "Improvement" to a corrupted system doesn't usually bode well because it usually implies that the "second tier" will simply "move in" to take over the "first tier" as well as to take care of the "first tier" which has somewhat "gracefully" made way for the "second tier" to come up to the podium. As we know from the computer, once the system has been corrupted by viruses, and if the corruption is severe (which must be in the cases that we are talking about), then we need to reinstall a new system. Those impoverished may install the same old system which is not the wisest thing to do because it has been shown to be easily corruptible. A completely new system is required to be installed, as in the old system with new safeguards or a new system with a completely different platform or paradigm altogether so that the viruses as we know them to do be cannot penetrate. In the realm of politics, the opposition to the incumbent government is usually of the same mould except that it is the opposite. The real challenge for change is to come up with something that is completely different from the incumbent and the opposite, and in the comfort zone of human horizon, the third force is usually a synthesis of the first two (acknowledgment to Hegelian dialectics). I prefer the George Bernard Shaw vision: People see things as they are and ask Why?; I dream of things that are not and ask Why not? In this way, we truly move forward and beyond the ordinary, meaning beyond what we are used to.

As in politics, economic change can also be traumatic. In the world of economic theory that many of us grew up in, the economic change is very much Victorian - small little marginal changes (mathematically called perturbations) which do not really upset the system at all, merely to test the robustness of the system. What happens when the system is not robust? The system breaks down, and a new system has to be reconstructed from the old model or constructed completely new from scratch. That is in the world of economic theory. In the world of economic reality, what happens?

In the world of economic reality, when the economic system shows any sign of struggle such as the rattling of some parts, the political masters, being control freaks, instinctively try to and usually do takeover the economic system completely. This is usually done by a process called Emergency Rule when the system is deemed to be at the very breaking down and the Master must now be "hands on" to smooth things over. As when a non-doctor tries to cure a (severe) headache with blind prescription of panadol, likewise in economic policy, the non-economist blindly prescribes monetary expansion as the cure for all economic headaches. Central bankers in trying to please their political masters consciously try not to trigger off any economic adjustments in order the central bankers not be blamed for any consequent crisis that will be created later on. When this happens, it is a sure sign of weak leadership or technical ignorance in both the political and the economic policy arenas. As in medicine, if an illness is not cured immediately at the root (preventive medicine) while merely plastering over the obvious symptoms, we have been taught that the illness is going to become very bad and can even become life threatening. In economic policy, we know that when the root economic problems are not properly resolved, economic adjustments will be forced onto the system and explode. The 1990 Japanese Asset Bubble, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2010 US Financial Crisis. With political repercussions. These are all adjustments of the socio-politico-economic systems that politicians have been trying to lord over around the world in the last two decades or so.

At the very least, the US economy is now undergoing some drastic adjustments - collapse of property prices and the US dollar as well as some banks commercial and investment. In this way, I believe that the US economy will manage its find its own feet after a few years and give the Chinese a good fighting in the global economy. Malaysia, in looking east and following Japan, is still caught in an asset bubble, and banks with a huge loan book to households, can only stay solvent so long as loan growth is high enough to cover up the subprime problem which must be festering. The problem with monetary policy is that you really cannot stage manage a "soft landing". You are flying at 30,000 feet and suddenly you let go of the fuel pedal; what happens. Brakes become irrelevant. Such events are studied as chaos theory or catastrophe theory. It starts with a smooth ride with a little change, and the next thing that hits is breaking point or if lucking a turning point.

With the present being an accident of the past, the Malaysian economy is now saddled with some fairly difficult problems. Now truly Malaysian, the purpose in life is to be very very rich, and for that you do not need an education. Education in fact can become a hindrance to material wealth for you really do have to go to garbage dump and shift through while the government keeps bringing in truckloads of banknotes to dump. The scavengers now employ bodyguards to mark out territories in the name of politics and justice, and the only fellows who work are those poorly paid to do the manual work. The end result of the activities must be handled to the masters of monopolies who compete among themselves to see who is the cleverest. What else get done in the economy? Houses, roads, cars.

The current government in Malaysia is in a most unenviable situation. The party is over, the cash is spent, now we are living on borrowed money. But everybody is well trained to be mercenary. Grab and run. How do you change this mindset.

In the macroeconomic front, there are a few variable to grapple with. While the ringgit will try not to fall with the US dollar - and hence heading from 3.00 to 2.70 and 2.50 - it is not that particularly strong either as can be seen from its Singapore dollar rate of 2.30 although this is an improvement from 2.40-45. A real show of strength for the ringgit is when it can go to 2.00, 1.80 and 1.50 to the Singapore dollar. I would be happy to see sterling at 4 ringgit from the current 5.

Of course, now the financial markets are in turmoil in Malaysia. Will there be an election rally. Will interest rates be raised to curb inflation. These are rumours used by currency speculators from offshore financial centres to shore up the currency and equity markets for a while. Buy on rumours, sell on news. All these will be over by May, June. The central bank can be concerned with the reserve requirement to reduce the credit multiplier from capital inflows, and banks will be incredibly silly to lend long term using short term funds as we had seen in 1997.

In the meantime, let us try to build our economic foundation of a solid education system, a court of justice, an economic system where those who work hard will get the fruit of their labour. Let us bring proper pricing back to the local system. Let us continue to teach our children that they have a bright future in Malaysia if they work very hard. This will be real change.