Viruses Attack
• Sars: Severe acute respiratory syndrome is the deadly virus of 2002 and 2003. It causes fever, headaches, body aches, pneumonia and diarrhoea, among other symptoms. It almost cause the collapse of the airline and travel industries.
Sars originates in Asia and spreads to more than two dozen countries on four continents before it is contained. The death toll: 774 people. Airline industries almost got "Killed" by this new and relatively unknown virus and the global world was not prepared when it started and no known vaccine was available at the time of disaster.
• Avian flu: The virus, also known as bird flu, claims its first human victims in 1997 in Hong Kong. It re-emerges in 2003 and 2004, killing almost 60 per cent of those it infects. The toll has reached more than 260 people, according to WHO figures.
• The H1N1 virus: The virus is deemed a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation on June 11 this year, making it the first flu pandemic of the 21st century. At least 11,516 people worldwide have been killed by H1N1 since the disease first emerged in April in Mexico. Medical companies are in the big rush to produce the required amount of vaccines for the people and it seems this virus is not as deadly as originally anticipated.
We could see that the economy at end of 2009 is picking up some steam and 2010 may still be volatile and any such kind of "troubles" mutating into more serious consequences may at anytime cause the collapse of any industry, including the vulnerable effects created by non other than, Terrorism , which is the most "deadly virus" in human spread by "unkind" mankind.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
A Decade in Retrospect .....
Fall of the Dot-com
It started not with a boom, the prices of technology stocks that had been listed without their companies ever making a dollar of profit. It ended with a major bust.
All that was needed was the promise of limitless growth on the Internet's new e-commerce platform. By March 2000, the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index in the United States had crossed the 5,000 mark - more than doubling its value in just one year. But that proved to be the peak of the bubble and the ensuing crash wiped out US$5 trillion in market value of technology companies from March 2000 to October 2002.
In Singapore, the pain of the dot.com bust was felt most acutely by some unit trust investors. Some had poured their life savings, after receiving their CPF retirement payout, into technology funds which were heavily marketed at the time - even to the elderly.
Tech funds lost as much as 70 per cent of their value following the crash, and most are still underwater even today.
Enron
It may have been named 'America's Most Innovative Company' by Fortune magazine for six consecutive years, but no one expected it to apply its creativity so expertly to cooking its books. From inflating revenues to hiding losses in 'special purpose' subsidiaries, the litany of sins revealed by a whistle-blower in October 2001 eventually led to what was then the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history.
The Enron debacle was followed by a series of scandals at big names like Tyco and WorldCom. The accounting scandals eventually led to the establishment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 (which punished fraud more severely) and a more general push for corporate transparency worldwide.
Greenspan's legacy
UNTIL his retirement in 2006, Mr Alan Greenspan was arguably the most closely watched individual in the world. As the longest-serving chairman of the powerful US Federal Reserve, he presided over the world's most important financial variables - US interest rates and the US dollar. Yet, he once famously said: 'I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said!'
What is now clear, however, is the octogenarian's principles and policies largely shaped the path of the global economy this decade. His favourite remedy of aggressively easing interest rates - and thus encouraging spending and borrowing - helped the world get back on its feet once again after the dot.com bust and the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.
OIL PRICE
In the 80s and 90s, the crude oil price generally remained stable at below US$30 a barrel, after adjusting for inflation, cheaper than you pay for same amount of say, orange juice...
But oil prices begun rising sharply in 2003 in tandem with a worldwide economic boom, hitting a peak of US$147.30 a barrel in July 2008. The boom was a result of rising demand for oil, particularly in rapidly industrialising nations like China and India. At the same time, oil supplies worldwide are dwindling. Financial speculators also moved in. The relentless trading of oil contracts exacerbated the price spike and led later to calls for increased regulation.
The story of too little supply chasing too much demand spilled over to other commodities such as agricultural produce, and the steel, copper and other metals that fed the mid-decade building boom.
The result of all this was the highest inflation seen in decades.
Back home here in Singapore, it hit almost 7 per cent, with the cost of everything from rice to cooking oil rising sharply. Some major companies were forced to make one-off payments to staff to help them cope. But just as it caused pain, the boom enriched oil-producing regions like the Middle East and Russia. Oil money would pay for some of the most spectacular urbanisation the world has ever seen, in cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Moscow.
World class oil rig builder Keppel FELS in these two years of high oil price, signed many rig contracts with deliveries stretched up to year 2011 and in 2009, it was the best year of performance with 13 rigs delivered to overseas client. Though contracts award was slow in 2009, the yard is still being kept busy with ongoing contracts. The next wave of rig orders could be from Brazilian sector as Petrobras, the state-owned company, has already announced their few years ahead plan to explore new fields recently being discovered, one of them the Tupi field.
Property Craze
PROPERTY will be a bittersweet note when investors look back on this decade.
In the US, cheap loans given out by banks, even to borrowers with terrible credit histories, helped chase up house prices. Americans felt richer and spent more, fuelling an export boom that drove much of Asia's phenomenal growth this decade.
But the eventual bursting of the property bubble - and the ensuing collapse in home prices - had the opposite effect on Asia as Americans slammed their wallets shut. Exports collapsed by up to a-third, sending countries like Taiwan, Korea and Singapore into their worst recession in decades.
The US was not the only place where property prices soared. The economic boom years of 2004-2008 also led to global investors putting their money in the promising property markets of Asia.
In Singapore, the boom in luxury property led to record prices of over $5,000 per sq ft, a frenzied market for the collective sales of old condo sites. The bubble burst with the onset of the financial crisis late last year, with prices correcting 20 per cent to 30 per cent.
But a surprise boom in suburban properties followed barely six months later, ensuring that property stayed the way it was for most of the decade. The Singapore government step in to cool the market by letting off new sites for development and increasing the numbers of HDB units to be built, either the design and build or the standard government highly subsidised 4&5 room units.
Sub-prime crisis
The global financial crisis of September 2008 will probably go down in history in the decade. But even though its story has been told countless times, it is still not fully understood by many.
What seems to have happened was that new instruments in the financial markets allowed banks to give 'sub-prime' loans to dodgy borrowers in an almost limitless way. This was because the banks were able to re-package and pass on the risk. The housing market collapsed in US, investments became close to worthless, most of the world's biggest banks and insurers had already chalked up trillions in inter-connected debts to each other, all related to these dodgy instruments.
The crisis bankrupted 158-year-old Lehman Brothers and its collapse in turn threatened to bring down storied names like AIG, UBS, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Financial markets went into a tailspin and credit seized up. Panicked consumers and companies stopped spending, trade slowed and jobs were axed. By the time spring came round, economists were painting doomsday scenarios of double-digit declines and an uncertain, slow path to recovery.
In Singapore, many retirees sunk their live saving pension funds into minibonds suffered the same fate and their money invested became worthless and all of them are now still waiting on hope of getting some "refund" provided the law is on their side.
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_291048.html
More than US$6 trillion in stimulus spending was pumped into economies early 2009 when Mr Barrack Obama just took over office from Mr Bush in a bid to get credit and business flowing again. It was not a smooth and immediate cure to the problem and took almost a year before we see some "green shoots" started sprouting in some global continents. China and India were surprisingly in better shaper than others.
"Chindia" [ China & India combine ]
Ignoring the busting trends, the most enduring story this decade has been the rise of Asia's two economic giants - China and India.
In the last 20 years, China has been growing at more than 9 per cent per year, and India by about 6 per cent. China is already narrowing the gap with the world's No. 2 economy Japan, and by mid-century, it should overtake the US as No. 1. By then, China and India could be producing half the world's goods and services.
To make things more intimidating, China and India seem to complement each other's strengths. China is a manufacturing and engineering powerhouse, while India excels in services industries like software, accounting and design.
And that's not even considering both countries' rapidly expanding consumer bases. China is already the world's largest consumer of mobile phones and the third largest buyer of cars. India's rising middle-class is already making its presence felt, snapping up property and other investments in major cities of the world.
What happens next? Well, all eyes are on policymakers to see if they can properly control economies that are speeding trains that threaten all the time to veer off-course.
But an equally big worry is whether these giants will team up in future and dwarf everyone else. Annual trade between the two economies was just US$52 billion last year. Let's keep our finger cross.
It started not with a boom, the prices of technology stocks that had been listed without their companies ever making a dollar of profit. It ended with a major bust.
All that was needed was the promise of limitless growth on the Internet's new e-commerce platform. By March 2000, the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index in the United States had crossed the 5,000 mark - more than doubling its value in just one year. But that proved to be the peak of the bubble and the ensuing crash wiped out US$5 trillion in market value of technology companies from March 2000 to October 2002.
In Singapore, the pain of the dot.com bust was felt most acutely by some unit trust investors. Some had poured their life savings, after receiving their CPF retirement payout, into technology funds which were heavily marketed at the time - even to the elderly.
Tech funds lost as much as 70 per cent of their value following the crash, and most are still underwater even today.
Enron
It may have been named 'America's Most Innovative Company' by Fortune magazine for six consecutive years, but no one expected it to apply its creativity so expertly to cooking its books. From inflating revenues to hiding losses in 'special purpose' subsidiaries, the litany of sins revealed by a whistle-blower in October 2001 eventually led to what was then the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history.
The Enron debacle was followed by a series of scandals at big names like Tyco and WorldCom. The accounting scandals eventually led to the establishment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 (which punished fraud more severely) and a more general push for corporate transparency worldwide.
Greenspan's legacy
UNTIL his retirement in 2006, Mr Alan Greenspan was arguably the most closely watched individual in the world. As the longest-serving chairman of the powerful US Federal Reserve, he presided over the world's most important financial variables - US interest rates and the US dollar. Yet, he once famously said: 'I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said!'
What is now clear, however, is the octogenarian's principles and policies largely shaped the path of the global economy this decade. His favourite remedy of aggressively easing interest rates - and thus encouraging spending and borrowing - helped the world get back on its feet once again after the dot.com bust and the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.
OIL PRICE
In the 80s and 90s, the crude oil price generally remained stable at below US$30 a barrel, after adjusting for inflation, cheaper than you pay for same amount of say, orange juice...
But oil prices begun rising sharply in 2003 in tandem with a worldwide economic boom, hitting a peak of US$147.30 a barrel in July 2008. The boom was a result of rising demand for oil, particularly in rapidly industrialising nations like China and India. At the same time, oil supplies worldwide are dwindling. Financial speculators also moved in. The relentless trading of oil contracts exacerbated the price spike and led later to calls for increased regulation.
The story of too little supply chasing too much demand spilled over to other commodities such as agricultural produce, and the steel, copper and other metals that fed the mid-decade building boom.
The result of all this was the highest inflation seen in decades.
Back home here in Singapore, it hit almost 7 per cent, with the cost of everything from rice to cooking oil rising sharply. Some major companies were forced to make one-off payments to staff to help them cope. But just as it caused pain, the boom enriched oil-producing regions like the Middle East and Russia. Oil money would pay for some of the most spectacular urbanisation the world has ever seen, in cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Moscow.
World class oil rig builder Keppel FELS in these two years of high oil price, signed many rig contracts with deliveries stretched up to year 2011 and in 2009, it was the best year of performance with 13 rigs delivered to overseas client. Though contracts award was slow in 2009, the yard is still being kept busy with ongoing contracts. The next wave of rig orders could be from Brazilian sector as Petrobras, the state-owned company, has already announced their few years ahead plan to explore new fields recently being discovered, one of them the Tupi field.
Property Craze
PROPERTY will be a bittersweet note when investors look back on this decade.
In the US, cheap loans given out by banks, even to borrowers with terrible credit histories, helped chase up house prices. Americans felt richer and spent more, fuelling an export boom that drove much of Asia's phenomenal growth this decade.
But the eventual bursting of the property bubble - and the ensuing collapse in home prices - had the opposite effect on Asia as Americans slammed their wallets shut. Exports collapsed by up to a-third, sending countries like Taiwan, Korea and Singapore into their worst recession in decades.
The US was not the only place where property prices soared. The economic boom years of 2004-2008 also led to global investors putting their money in the promising property markets of Asia.
In Singapore, the boom in luxury property led to record prices of over $5,000 per sq ft, a frenzied market for the collective sales of old condo sites. The bubble burst with the onset of the financial crisis late last year, with prices correcting 20 per cent to 30 per cent.
But a surprise boom in suburban properties followed barely six months later, ensuring that property stayed the way it was for most of the decade. The Singapore government step in to cool the market by letting off new sites for development and increasing the numbers of HDB units to be built, either the design and build or the standard government highly subsidised 4&5 room units.
Sub-prime crisis
The global financial crisis of September 2008 will probably go down in history in the decade. But even though its story has been told countless times, it is still not fully understood by many.
What seems to have happened was that new instruments in the financial markets allowed banks to give 'sub-prime' loans to dodgy borrowers in an almost limitless way. This was because the banks were able to re-package and pass on the risk. The housing market collapsed in US, investments became close to worthless, most of the world's biggest banks and insurers had already chalked up trillions in inter-connected debts to each other, all related to these dodgy instruments.
The crisis bankrupted 158-year-old Lehman Brothers and its collapse in turn threatened to bring down storied names like AIG, UBS, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Financial markets went into a tailspin and credit seized up. Panicked consumers and companies stopped spending, trade slowed and jobs were axed. By the time spring came round, economists were painting doomsday scenarios of double-digit declines and an uncertain, slow path to recovery.
In Singapore, many retirees sunk their live saving pension funds into minibonds suffered the same fate and their money invested became worthless and all of them are now still waiting on hope of getting some "refund" provided the law is on their side.
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_291048.html
More than US$6 trillion in stimulus spending was pumped into economies early 2009 when Mr Barrack Obama just took over office from Mr Bush in a bid to get credit and business flowing again. It was not a smooth and immediate cure to the problem and took almost a year before we see some "green shoots" started sprouting in some global continents. China and India were surprisingly in better shaper than others.
"Chindia" [ China & India combine ]
Ignoring the busting trends, the most enduring story this decade has been the rise of Asia's two economic giants - China and India.
In the last 20 years, China has been growing at more than 9 per cent per year, and India by about 6 per cent. China is already narrowing the gap with the world's No. 2 economy Japan, and by mid-century, it should overtake the US as No. 1. By then, China and India could be producing half the world's goods and services.
To make things more intimidating, China and India seem to complement each other's strengths. China is a manufacturing and engineering powerhouse, while India excels in services industries like software, accounting and design.
And that's not even considering both countries' rapidly expanding consumer bases. China is already the world's largest consumer of mobile phones and the third largest buyer of cars. India's rising middle-class is already making its presence felt, snapping up property and other investments in major cities of the world.
What happens next? Well, all eyes are on policymakers to see if they can properly control economies that are speeding trains that threaten all the time to veer off-course.
But an equally big worry is whether these giants will team up in future and dwarf everyone else. Annual trade between the two economies was just US$52 billion last year. Let's keep our finger cross.
Lifelong learning
http://www.kepcorp.com/ekeppelite/view.article.asp?A=3642&C=7&Y=2009&M=10
September 2009....
Meanwhile, Choong Kim Whye, Senior Manager, Engineering (Mechanical) at Keppel FELS, pursued a Master of Science in Marine Technology (International) programme. This course is designed to provide full-time engineers with enhanced technical and managerial techniques applicable to the offshore and marine industry.
He says, “I hope to be a good role model to other Keppelites and inspire them to practise lifelong learning with my experiences.”
In reference to some sites, "Lifelong learning" is basically about:
- acquiring and updating all kinds of abilities, interests, knowledge and qualifications from the pre-school years to post-retirement. It promotes the development of knowledge and competences that will enable each individual to adapt to the knowledge-based working environment and actively participate in all areas of social, technological and economical life, taking more control of his or her future.
- valuing all forms of learning, including: formal learning, such as a degree or post-degree courses at university; non-formal learning, such as vocational skills acquired at the workplace or on-the-job training; and informal learning, such as inter-generational learning, for example where parents learn to use ICT through their children, or learning how to play an instrument together with friends.
Learning opportunities should be available to all on an ongoing basis. In practice this should mean that each have individual learning pathways, suitable to their needs and interests at all stages of their working lives. The content of learning, the way learning is accessed, and where it takes place may vary depending on the learner and their learning requirements. In some major organisations, learning could be done ad-hoc or tailored through the Human Resource Training center identifying each employee of their learning needs, which could be on yearly basis.
Lifelong learning is also about providing "second chances" to update basic skills and also offering learning opportunities at more advanced levels, as in some companies, requiring staff to be highly trained in certain specialised knowledge skills. All this means that formal systems of provision need to become much more open and flexible, so that such opportunities can truly be tailored to the needs of the learner, or indeed the potential learner.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Quotable quotes
'You don't get a gold star on your forehead for being the first one to open. We are going to open when it's right.'
SHELDON ADELSON, Las Vegas Sands chairman, on rival Resorts World Sentosa opening before Marina Bay Sands
'In the quietest water swims the ugliest fish.'
HELEN ALFREDSSON, Swedish golfer, on Tiger Woods' philandering ways
'If the climate was a bank, they would have already saved it.'
HUGO CHAVEZ, Venezuelan's President, addressing the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen
'I am an ordinary person, a father, a husband, a brother, an uncle, a friend. I have a family, made up of a wife, two sons and a daughter. We go to family get-togethers, we go out. We play sports.'
MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, Iran's President, in response to comments about how he is viewed as a bogeyman in the West
'He has the left foot of Maradona, the switch of rhythm of Cruyff and the lethal passing of Ronaldinho.'
Barcelona newspaper El Mundo Deportivo, on LIONEL MESSI, who won the World Player of the Year award at a Fifa gala ceremony in Zurich
SHELDON ADELSON, Las Vegas Sands chairman, on rival Resorts World Sentosa opening before Marina Bay Sands
'In the quietest water swims the ugliest fish.'
HELEN ALFREDSSON, Swedish golfer, on Tiger Woods' philandering ways
'If the climate was a bank, they would have already saved it.'
HUGO CHAVEZ, Venezuelan's President, addressing the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen
'I am an ordinary person, a father, a husband, a brother, an uncle, a friend. I have a family, made up of a wife, two sons and a daughter. We go to family get-togethers, we go out. We play sports.'
MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, Iran's President, in response to comments about how he is viewed as a bogeyman in the West
'He has the left foot of Maradona, the switch of rhythm of Cruyff and the lethal passing of Ronaldinho.'
Barcelona newspaper El Mundo Deportivo, on LIONEL MESSI, who won the World Player of the Year award at a Fifa gala ceremony in Zurich
Dark Side of Internet
The dark side of internet
Ease of accessibility of information for the picking is not always a good thing.
Just as companies and organisations use social networking to advertise, hackers and con men have been quick on the uptake - using spams attack on millions of users to trick them into revealing their user names and passwords.
A common ploy by hackers, for example, is to send Facebook messages to a victim's list of friends, claiming the person is stranded and asking for money to help him or her.
The porn industry, frequently a far-sighted and early adopter of new technologies, has also pushed adult entertainment increasingly into the mainstream via the Internet. Though the authorities try to block them as much as they could, few will somehow slip through the checks and continue to take advantage of the "young and green" net users unaware of such scams.
In the workplace, employees have been caught red-handed when their Facebook accounts showed photos of them out having fun when they were supposed to have reported sick,etc. Some major companies have already block such access in offices and staff are not allowed to get "hook".
A survey of 1,460 office workers in Britain earlier this year found that half of them visited social networking sites during office hours, spending an average of 40 minutes a week, posting sensitive information, and costing £1.38 billion (S$3.1 billion) in lost work hours.
Then there are the many humiliated people who have had compromising photos or information of themselves posted online, or others who were victims of online sexual harassment or cyber-bullying.
In one of the most notorious of such cases in 2006, 13-year-old American Megan Meier killed herself after being taunted online. Her friend's mother had created a fake persona of a male teenager online to torment her, because she thought Megan was gossiping about her daughter.
Spending too much time on such sites can also be damaging, leading to addiction problems and anti-social behaviour, said psychologists, who are already seeing such numbers picking up.
Young net users admit to spending hours a day surfing and playing computer games and seems to create social disadvantages to these youngsters.
'We have countless online friends but fewer real ones. We have so many activities in cyberspace but spend even more time alone. The Internet has brought people closer, and pulled them further apart, than ever before.'
It will be difficult to predict what will happen over the next 10 years, say the experts, computing speeds will be even faster.
'Imagine downloading a whole movie in a minute or so. Access will also become even more mobile, so that even more of what you get on your PC will be available on handheld gadgets like phones.'
Companies are also looking at areas such as how best to track eye movements so as to assess search efficiency, online advertisements and navigation, or how to search images based on visual characteristics instead of text tags.
Let's hope there will some kind of literacy or educational means of maintaining the net users and guiding them along the path without having to overindulging and use of the computer or netbook.
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