Dec 19, 2011

Unless you read the Straits Times (and my deepest sympathies if you do), Sunshine Empire might be the biggest ponzi scheme you’ve never heard of. Between 2003 and late 2007, the company took in more than $180 million from investors in return for “lifestyle packages” and cash rebates. Of the $180 million, $115 million was paid back to investors, $40 million was handed out to directors as “interest-free loans”, and the rest - $25 million - just… disappeared.

Nov 20, 2011

Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, gave a talk in Singapore last month - and he had some interesting things to say in the Q&A session about the country’s casino gambling policy. When asked by a member of the (mostly civil-servant-trainee) crowd what he thought of Singapore’s casino entry fee system, he pointed out one potentially major flaw - the $100-per-entry fee for Singaporean citizens might actually increase gambling losses, because if you pay $100 to get in, you’re going to want to feel like you’re getting value for money.

Sep 2, 2011

One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. The Commercial Affairs Department investigation is ongoing, and the directors of the firm were ordered to hand over their passports and stay in Singapore. So imagine the High Court’s surprise when two directors - a husband-and-wife pair - failed to appear at a hearing earlier this week, because the police had handed back their passports and let them travel to England:

Aug 27, 2011

Update 2: as JRE exclusively predicted last night, the winner is Mr Tan! GIC chair Tony Tan scraped home late in the night, winning by just 7,000 votes out of 2.1 million. Tony Tan polled a total of 745,000 votes, which (thanks to @FakeSTCom for the gag) is still 745,000 more votes than S.R. Nathan ever polled. Update: at midnight Singapore time, we have a race on our hands! The @stcom Twitter feed is as good a source as any of “unofficial” (suuuure) leaked numbers; and their take is that it’s a dead-heat between PAP favourite Tony Tan and PAP-linked outsider Tan Cheng Bock, on about 35% of the vote each.

Aug 5, 2011

Josh Brown’s article from yesterday on the “ETF Singularity” is a winner. …we now have Concrete ETFs, Rare Earths ETFs, Global Aquaculture (Fishing!) ETFs, ETFs that hold only metals that are the color white (look it up – WITE, I kid you not)… We need to make an ETF of all the loony swap-based ETFs that have been launched over the last few years. And we could call it the World’s Traded Fund, so its ticker symbol would be WTF!