May 3, 2011

Earlier today, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke (and begged for mercy from the electorate) at a People’s Action Party rally in Singapore’s CBD. One part of his speech seems to have been almost buried, but it’s pretty newsworthy - the PM seems to be carefully marginalising the man who ran the country for more than thirty years, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. The PAP appears to be admitting that their venerated elder statesman is becoming a potentially massive PR liability:

Apr 27, 2011

Update: Hi! If you enjoyed this post, I’ve got a series on Singapore’s election going up over the next week: Election 2011: the Redistricting Election 2011: Nomination Day (this post) Election 2011: He’s Their Helen Thomas …and there’s more to come. Today was Nomination Day. There’s only one day in the entire election cycle where candidates can register to get on the ballot for a Singaporean election.

Apr 20, 2011

Update: Hi! If you enjoyed this post, I’ve got a series on Singapore’s election going up over the next week: Election 2011: the Redistricting (this post) Election 2011: Nomination Day Election 2011: He’s Their Helen Thomas …and there’s more to come. This is the first in a series of pieces on Singapore’s General Election, which was announced yesterday after a month of phoney-war campaigning. 2.4 million registered voters will go to the polls on May 7th, and - let’s not mince words here - the result is a foregone conclusion.

Apr 9, 2011

Even if you read nothing else this weekend, you must read John Hempton’s incendiary takedown of the SGX’s thwarted merger with the ASX. All I’ll add is that he’s absolutely right. Those dodgy S-chip listings that sucked up so much of Singaporean investors’ money in the mid-to-late-2000s (they were handing out prospectuses in Raffles Place as late as early 2008) are now collapsing or being suspended at the rate of one or two a fortnight.

Mar 18, 2011

I’ve ranted previously about people calling things “flash crashes” that don’t deserve the name. Fat fingers; gunning stops; these things aren’t a patch on the original flash crash. But what happened in USDJPY two days ago, in the witching hour between the Wednesday session in New York and the Thursday session in Singapore - that was worthy of being called a flash crash. The least liquid time of day in the FX markets is after 5pm in New York: the NYC traders are in the pub; the Sydney traders are still waiting for their first cup of coffee to kick in; and the Tokyo and Singapore traders (except for a few dedicated souls) aren’t at their desks yet.