Ahh reading my own blog...

Nothing to do... so ive been reading my own blog... the quality of posts seems to deteriorate over time...

Shinjuku Incident...

I went to watch Shinjuku Incident today. That movie is absolutely fantastic, and really thought provoking. Illegal migrant workers and that sort of thing. My father works in the construction line, so I have had plenty of brush ups with workers who don't have permits, or illegal workers. It really made me think, me as a chinese whose ancestors came to Malaysia just 3 generations ago, what it was like to be living that far away from home, away from your family trying to make a living in a foreign country. What happens when the local population discriminates against you, and considers you as something that is inferior. It's been more than half a century since my grandparents/greatgrandparents have migrated to Malaysia. What was it like for them to come here. Why did they come, was life really bad back in China? I remember my father telling me my grandfather came here because the family was being harrassed by tu di. I think that means some sort of gangsters back then. We've come a long way since then...

I guess this must be quite really relevant to the chinese people in China, although even I can relate slightly to what it must have been like. What it's like to bow your head and be treated like that. I suppose chinese people tend to have a lot more sense of pride. We don't like to lose. That might be one of the reasons why the chinese as a whole have been successful.


Hah... It feels like nationalism, except it's for another country. I guess when you have policies in a country that directly discriminates against your race you tend to have less feeling for it. Although I think even if the chinese people in Malaysia would go back to China, as most politicians here seem to want us to. China wouldn't welcome us, because we just aren't it's citizens anymore.

It also makes me appreciate people who don't discriminate against other people. People like Kiang I suppose, he does some pretty stupid things, but his the sort of guy who would never discriminate against other races, it's the sort of thing that I've never seen in anyone else, it's funny because if anyone was in the position to discriminate against somebody of lower class, it would be him.

The Crisis of Credit visualized

The Crisis of Credit visualized, and it's an animation that gives an easy to understand walk through of the credit crisis and how it all happened.

To anyone who has heard of the credit crisis but doesn't know heads or tails of it. Here's a good place to start.

Part 1
Part 2

I actually wrote an article on this. Couple of months back.

I give up.

Tired

Old already, Maybe I've become a little bit stupid. . . . . What to do? I read somewhere that the body goes into overload when people become stressed, adrenaline starts pumping, your body goes on alert and all that crap to make you think and move faster... and if you can't manage your stress properly your body resists going back to normal, and that's when the fatigue kicks in and you just feel tired, all the fucking time. I think that's what has been happening to me.

I'm tired, fuck it. Time to sleep.

Life update...

I'm in my third week in Sunway, and I don't think I'm settling down quite as well as I would want to. I don't really know anyone that well yet, and some of the dudes that I do know I find quite annoying and most of the people here are 3 or 4 years my junior.

When I go to college I find that I kind of numb myself to outside input, I don't really feel anything. It's kind of walking into the lecture room and somehow or another I feel as if I'm not really there. Some of the lecturers are so boring it feels as if my brains about to melt and drip out of my ears. Bla bla bla, bla bla bla... at least the notes are complete, that way I won't have to fail. Ohh man... I should have just skipped this course and just started looking for a job in some relevant field and just work my way up from there. I get the impression that many of the dudes in this course don't really have any idea where they want to be in the future, and when I talk about the sort of thing I'm interested in, like stocks, or just talk about joining some clubs or something or another.. I generally get an uhhhh... or I hear all this shit about how they did this and they did that, and somehow or another it becomes like a pissing contest.

Or maybe I'm just bad with people... Ahhh...

Isn't this a bloody course in Banking and Finance???? You would think that these people would know something in line with finance or investments wouldn't you???

Haha US

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

Now, just look at history and the last one is the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997/8. Now apply the above quotation. The IMF left the Asian countries then no choice but gave them the immediate medicine of the 1st alternative but instead of "a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion" it was a mandatory contraction as a requirement condition of funding support i.e. belt tightening.

Whereas for the US getting into trouble because of too much consumption due to credit expansion is thinking of curing the problem by getting into more debts to stimulate the consumption to support the economy. Anyone with half a brain will know that it will be the 2nd alternative result in the making i.e. "or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." Note that H. Clinton was in China asking China not to stop buying US treasuries.

Because the USD is the world's reserve currency, the recent strength of the USD is guaranteeing further economic deterioration as an important contributor to the continue down trend.

Going by earnings of S n P 500, the strength of the USD will further pull that down for sure to around 600.

The strength of the USD benefits all other countries except the US and therefore, the rest of the world will recover well before the US which will most probably be further into the lost decade as happened to Japan.

Note that South Korea recovered from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis in about 2 years even after the country's balance sheet was completely wiped out. How? Auterity measures and a depressed currency stimulate the exports economy that quickly repaired the balance sheet. Neither Bernanke nor Geithner seem to understand economics 101 or they think economics 101 does not apply to the US.