You were given the chance but messed it up...

This Anwar fellow thinks that he seems to know more about the Malaysian economy than anybody else in Malaysia. He says that the Malaysia is facing an economic crisis much worse than the Asian financial crisis of 1997/1998. He says that the present economic crisis may be identical to the crisis causing the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the present Malaysian leaders are not doing enough to cope with the crisis and implies that, were he to become the Prime Minister of Malaysia, only then the crisis in the country could be staved, averted or properly managed.

He forgot that at one time he was given the chance to handle a similar crisis in the country but instead of averting or properly managing the financial crisis, he messed it up to the extent that it took a  brave man to handle it. When Anwar was in a position of power, he was overcome - in fact he panicked -  by the magnitude of the financial situation that he had no other way but to go the way of the IMF. When the IMF told him to increase the interest rate, he increased it. When the IMF told him  to cut down the NPL period, he cut it down to 3 months. In fact he was about to do a lot more things, like abandoning the NEP policy, removing fuel subsidy, allowing banks to collapse, borrowing money from the IMF etc. as demanded by the IMF, but was a stopped by a more intelligent Minister. He introduced controls preventing Malaysians going abroad from bringing more than a certain amount of ringgit because he had the silly notion that, in droves, Malaysians when overseas were dumping their ringgits in favour of other currencies. Little did he know that, among the culprits causing the crisis, were financial terrorists like George Soros and his cohorts of funds managers who were singularly determined to destroy the financial systems of South-East Asia for their profits.

It took a brave man like Mahathir to confront and defeat the financial terrorists by introducing fixed exchange rates in Malaysia. As for Anwar, he did nothing to help the country.

And now after years of being in the doldrums - incarcerated in prison for 6 years, in a political limbo for another 2 to 3 years until recently - he comes out telling us that he can solve Malaysia's economic problems, when every one knows that Malaysia leadership has nothing to do with the crisis that the country is in. Its like Anwar saying that he could save Malaya out of World War II were he to be a leader of Malaya then.

In the present crisis created in the US where companies and banks go under as indicated by the severe drop in the Dow Jones index from about 2 months ago, the stock indices in Europe, Middle East, Russia and Asia did not fare any better. In fact some stocks indices, like in Russia and Indonesia, showed double-digit percentage losses in a single day. In an apparent contrarian historical performance, only the KLCE showed the least percentage loss in a single day over last week. In the past, Malaysia's KLSE was always the poorest performer, unlike recently. Currencywise, the AUD, Pound, Euro, seemed to be losing ground to the USD and the mighty Singapore dollar.

The world flies by ....

Hari Raya has come and gone. Yet, I have not done anything worthy of ...