Unprecedented Financial Scandal - A Whopping RM 8.4 Billion of Non-Performing Loans - By Matthias Chang (27/11/09)
By Matthias Chang
Thursday, 26 November 2009 19:11
Why has Bank Negara been keeping quiet all this while?
It is often said that the best time to announce bad news is just before the weekend or public holidays.
So it came as no surprise that CIMB Group Holdings Bhd (the country’s second largest financial group) decided to drop the bombshell that they have on their books a whopping RM 8.4 billion non-performing loans (NPLs) knowing that it will be a long weekend following tomorrow’s public holiday – Hari Raya Haji! How very clever.
But this scandal will not go away, that’s for sure!
This amount of NPL is historic and unprecedented in the Malaysian banking industry.
The New Straits Times reported that a special asset management vehicle will be set up to acquire the said NPLs – the Southeast Asia Special Asset Management Bhd which will be wholly owned by the group.
These NPLs represent 45,000 accounts which have been written down to RM 928 million net book value!
Wow!!!!!!!!
Why this announcement now?
These NPLs must have been in the bank’s balance sheet for quite some time. Recall that way back in early 2008, I had warned that Malaysian banks are in deep shits following the global financial tsunami, but the authorities, namely Bank Negara (Central Bank) and the Ministry of Finance denied that such was the state of health of our banks and declared that everything was under control and that NPLs were within tolerable limits.
It was gross misrepresentation. It was also irresponsible.
If CIMB is in such deep shits, expect other government controlled banks to be in a similar situation.
The decision of CIMB to park the NPLs in a special vehicle wholly owned by the group has not resolved the problem, as what this means is that the toxic waste has been transferred from the right pocket to the left pocket and by this sleight of hand, the bank is now deemed healthy!
If you believe this fairy tale, you might as well cease to be an investor and or trader in bank stocks!
But what is more frightening is that these NPLs’ net book value is a mere RM 928 million.
We can only draw one conclusion – these 45,000 accounts are not your ordinary loans to consumers (consumer banking) or small business loans (SME loans) because if it was so, there would be adequate securities in the form of landed properties (i.e. charges/mortgages) and or debentures.
I stand to be corrected, but these must be loans for “trading” either for the stock market or investments in debt instruments. Even if it is not and whatever may be the case, this huge black-hole is a scandal and the management must be brought to account for this sordid state of affairs. Heads must roll. CIMB is a GLC (government linked company) and therefore taxpayers’ monies are at stake.
The timing of this announcement, in the last quarter of 2009 is also significant. If as I had expected that the first quarter of 2010 leading to the 2nd quarter will be the start of the 2nd wave of the Global Financial Tsunami, then this tactical move by CIMB Bank is a pre-emptive move to cushion the inevitable fallout.
The Governor of Bank Negara must give a public explanation as to how she has allowed and or tolerated such a state of affairs and why no remedial actions were taken earlier. CIMB Group Holdings Bhd is the country’s second largest financial services provider and for this to happen at such a critical time is mind-boggling.
One cannot but conclude that whatever reforms and or so-called measures to ensure the continued good health of our banks are all talk, more talk and nothing else.
This issue must be debated in Parliament.
Bank Negara is the watch-dog of the banking industry. It is about time we have a watch-dog to oversee the watch-dog!
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
RED ALERT !
Red Alert: The Second Wave of The Financial Tsunami - The Wave Is Gathering Force and Is Most Likely to Hit the Global Economy Between the First and Second Quarter of 2010. Count On It! - By Matthias Chang (23/11/09)
By Matthias Chang
Sunday, 22 November 2009 21:12
Many of my friends who have been receiving my e-mail alerts over the last two years have lamented that in recent weeks I have not commented on the state of the global economy. I appreciate their anxiety but they forget that I am not a stock market analyst who is paid to write articles to lure investors back into the market. My website is free and I do not sell a financial newsletter so there is no need for me to churn out daily forecasts or analysis.
However, when the data is compelling and supports an inevitable trend, it is time for another review. This Red Alert is to enable visitors to my website to take appropriate actions to safeguard their wealth and welfare of their families in the coming months.
Since the last quarter of 2008, unrelenting currency warfare has been waged by the key global economies and while this competition thus far has been non-antagonistic, it will soon be antagonistic because the inherent differences are irreconcilable. The consequences to the global economy will be devastating and for the ordinary people, massive unemployment and social unrest are assured.
The policy-makers of these countries faced with the total collapse of the international financial architecture have concluded that the solution, the only solution is quantitative easing (i.e. massive injection of liquidity) to salvage the “too big to fail” banks and reflate their depressed economies. This is best reflected in Bernanke’s candid remark that, “the US government has a technology, called the printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost”.
This is the crux of the problem!
The Irreconcilable Differences
Some two decades ago, it was decided by the global financial elites that the framework for the global economy shall consist of:
1) A global derivative-based financial system, controlled by the US Federal Reserve Bank and its associate global banks in the developed countries.
2) The re-location from the West to the East in the production of goods, principally to China and India to “feed” the developed economies.
The entire system was built on a simple principle, that of a FED-controlled global reserve currency which will be the engine for growth for the global economy. It is essentially an imperialist economic principle.
Once we grasp this fundamental truth, Bernanke’s boast that the “US can produce as many US dollars as it wishes at no cost” takes on a different dimension.
I have talked to so many economists and when asked what is the crux of the present financial problem, they all respond in unison, “it is the global imbalances… the West consumes too much while the East saves too much and consumes not enough”. This is exemplified by the huge US trade deficits on the one part and China’s massive surpluses on the other.
Incredible wisdom and almost everyone echoes this mantra. The recent concluded APEC Summit was no different. This mantra was repeated as well as the call for freer trade between trading nations.
This is a grand hoax. All the current leaders on the world’s stage are corrupted to the rotten core and as such have no interest to call a spade a spade and expose the inherent contradictions within the existing financial system.
The call for a multi-polar world is meaningless when the entire global financial system is based on the unipolar US dollar reserve currency. This is the inherent contradiction within the present system and the problems associated with it cannot be resolved by another global reserve currency based on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as advocated by some countries. It was stillborn, the very moment it was conceived!
The leaders of China, Japan and the oil producing countries of the Middle East are all cursing and pissing about the current situation, but they don’t have the courage of their convictions to spell it out to their countrymen that they have been conned by the financial spin masters from the Fed acting on the instructions from Goldman Sachs.
Tell me which leader would dare admit that they have exchanged the nation’s wealth for toilet papers?
The toilet paper currency pantomime continues.
We have now reached a stalemate in the current currency war, not unlike the situation of the Cold War between the NATO pact countries and the Warsaw pact countries. Both sides were deterred by the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of nuclear wars. The costs to both sides were horrendous and it was only when the Soviet Union could not continue with the pace and cost of maintaining a nuclear deterrent and was forced into bankruptcy that the balance tilted in favour of the NATO alliance.
But it was a pyrrhic victory for the US and it allies. What kept the ability of the US to maintain its military might and outspend the Soviet Union was the right to print toilet paper currency and the acceptance of the US dollar by her allies as the world’s reserve currency.
But why did the countries allied to the US during the Cold War accepted the status quo?
Simple! They were all conned into believing that without the protection of Big Brother and its military outreach, they would be swallowed up by the communist menace. They agreed to march to the tune of the US Pied-Piper.
The next big question – why did the so-called “liberated” former communist allies of the Soviet bloc jump on the bandwagon?
Simple! They all believed in the illusion that was fostered by the global banks, led by Goldman Sachs that trading and selling their goods and services for the toilet paper US reserve currency would ensure untold wealth and prosperity.
But the biggest game in town was the Asia gambit. Japan, after a decade of recession following the burst of her property bubble did not have the means and the capacity to bring the game to the next level as envisaged by the financial architects in Goldman Sachs.
And China was the biggest beneficiary. The senior management of Goldman Sachs brokered a secret pact with China’s leaders that in exchange for orchestrating the most massive injection of US dollar capital and wholesale re-location of manufacturing capacity in the history of the global economy, China would recycle their hard-earned US toilet paper reserve currency wealth into US treasuries and other US debt instruments.
This was the necessary condition precedent for the global financial casino to rise to the next level of play.
Why?
The New Game
The financial architects at Goldman Sachs had a master plan – to dominate the global financial system. The means to achieve this financial power was the Shadow Banking System, the lynchpin being the derivative market and the securitization of assets, real and synthetic. The stakes would be huge, in the hundreds of US$ trillions and the way to transform the market was through massive leverage at all levels of the financial game.
But there was an inherent weakness in the overall scheme – the threat of inflation, more precisely hyperinflation. Such huge amount of liquidity in the system would invariably trigger the depreciation of the reserve currency and the confidence in the system.
Hence the need for a system to keep in check price inflation and the illusion that the purchasing power of the toilet paper reserve currency could be maintained.
This is where China came in. Once China became the world’s factory, the problem would be resolved. When a suit which previously cost US$600 could be had for less than US$100, and a pair of shoes for less than US$5, the scam masterminds concluded that there would be no foreseeable threat to the largest casino operation in history.
China agreed to the exchange as it has over a billion mouths to feed and jobs for hundreds of millions needed to be secured, without which the system could not be maintained. But China was pragmatic enough to have two “economic systems” – a Yuan based domestic economy and a US$ based export economy, in the hope that the profits and benefits of the export economy would enable China to transform and establish a viable and dynamic domestic market which in time would replace the export dependent economy. It was a deal made with the devil, but there were no viable alternative options at the material time, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Next Level of the Game
The next level of the game was reached when the toilet paper reserve currency literally went virtual – through the simple operation of a click of the mouse in the computers of the global banks.
The big boys at Goldman Sachs and other global banks were more than content to leave Las Vegas for the mafia and their miserable billions in turnover. The profits were considered dimes when compared to the hundreds of trillions generated by the virtual casino. It was a financial conquest beyond their wildest dreams. They even called themselves, “Master of the Universe”. Creating massive debts was the new game, and the big boys could even leverage more than 40 times capital! Asset values soared with so much liquidity chasing so few good assets.
However, the financial wizards failed to appreciate and or underestimate the amount of financial products that were needed to keep the game in play. They resorted to financial engineering – the securitization of assets. And when real assets were insufficient for securitization, synthetic assets were created. Soon enough, toxic waste was even considered as legitimate instruments for the game so long as it could be unloaded to greedy suckers with no recourse to the originators of these so-called investments.
For a time, it looked as if the financial wizards have solved the problem of how to feed the global casino monster.
Unfortunately, the music stopped and the bubble burst! And as they say the rest is history.
The Goldman Sach’s Remedy
When losses are in the US$ trillions and whatever assets / capital remaining are in the US$ billions, we have a huge problem – a financial black-hole.
The preferred remedy by the financial masterminds at Goldman Sachs was to create another hoax – that if the big global banks were to fail triggering a systemic collapse, there would be Armageddon. These “too big to fail” banks must be injected with massive amount of virtual monies to recapitalize and get rid of the toxic assets on their balance sheet. The major central banks in the developed countries in cahoots with Goldman Sachs sang the same tune. All sorts of schemes were conjured to legitimize this bailout.
In essence, what transpired was the mere transfer of monies from the left pocket to the right pocket, with the twist that the banks were in fact helping the Government to overcome the financial crisis.
The Fed and key central banks agreed to lend “virtual monies” to the “too big to fail” global banks at zero or near zero interest rate and these banks in turn would “deposit” these monies with the Fed and other central banks at agreed interest rates. These transactions are all mere book entries. Other “loans” from the Fed and central banks (again at zero or near zero interest rates) are used to purchase government debts, these debts being the stimulus monies needed to revive the real economy and create jobs for the growing unemployed. So in essence, these banks are given “free money” to lend to the government at prior agreed interest rates with no risks at all. It is a hoax!
These “monies” are not even the dollar bills, but mere book entries created out of thin air.
So when the Fed injects US$ trillions into the banking system, it merely credits the amount in the accounts of the “too big to fail” banks at the Fed.
When the system is applied to international trade, the same modus operandi is used to pay for the goods imported from China, Japan etc.
For the rest of the world, when buying goods denominated in US$, these countries must produce goods and services, sell them for dollars in order to purchase goods needed in their country. Simply put, they have to earn an income to purchase whatever goods and services needed. In contrast, all that the US needs to do is to create monies out of thin air and use them to pay for their imports!
The US can get away with this scam because it has the military muscle to compel and enforce this hoax. As stated earlier, this status quo was accepted especially during the Cold War and with some reluctance post the collapse of the Soviet Union, but with a proviso – that the US agrees to be the consumer of last resort. This arrangement provided some comfort because countries which have sold their goods to the US, can now use the dollars to buy goods from other countries as more than 80 per cent of world trade is denominated in dollars especially crude oil, the lifeline of the global economy.
But with the US in full bankruptcy and its citizens (the largest consumers in the world) being unable to borrow further monies to buy fancy goods from China, Japan and the rest of the world, the demand for dollar has evaporated. The dollar status as a reserve currency and its usefulness is being questioned more vocally.
The End Game
The present fallout can be summarized in simple terms:
Should a bankrupt (the US) be allowed to use money created out of thin air to pay for goods produced with the sweat and tears of hardworking citizens of exporting countries? Adding insult to injury, the same dollars are now purchasing a lot less than before. So what is the use of being paid in a currency that is losing rapidly its value?
On the other hand, the US is telling the whole world, especially the Chinese that if they are not happy with the status quo, there is nothing to stop them from selling to the other countries and accepting their currencies. But if they want to sell to the mighty USA, they must accept US toilet paper reserve currency and its right to create monies out of thin air!
This is the ultimate poker game and whosoever blinks first loses and will suffer irreparable financial consequences. But who has the winning hand?
The US does not have the winning hand. Neither has China the winning hand.
This state of affairs cannot continue for long, for whatever cards the US or China may be contemplating to throw at the table to gain strategic advantage, any short term gains will be pyrrhic, for it will not be able to address the underlying antagonistic contradictions.
When the survival of the system is dependent on the availability of credit (i.e. accumulating more debts) it is only a matter of time before both the debtor and creditor come to the inevitable conclusion that the debt will never be paid. And unless the creditor is willing to write off the debt, resorting to drastic means to collect the outstanding debt is inevitable.
It would be naïve to think that the US would quietly allow itself to be foreclosed! When we reach that stage, war will be inevitable. It will be the US-UK-Israel Axis against the rest of the world.
The Prelude to the End Game
The US economy will be spiraling out of control in the coming months and will reach critical point by the end of the 1st quarter 2010 and implode by the 2nd quarter.
The massive US$ trillions of dollars stimulus has failed to turn the economy around. The massive blood transfusion may have kept the patient alive, but there are numerous signs of multi-organ failure.
There will be another wave of foreclosures of residential and more importantly commercial properties by end December and early 2010. And the foreclosed properties in 2009 will lead to depressed prices once they come through the pipeline. Home and commercial property values will plunge. Banks’ balance sheets will turn ugly and whatever “record profits” in the last two quarters of 2009 will not cover the additional red ink.
Given the above situation, will the Fed continue to buy mortgage-backed securities to prop up the markets? The Fed has already spent trillions buying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages with no potential substitute buyer in sight. Therefore, the Fed’s balance sheet is as toxic as the “too big to fail” banks that it rescued.
In the circumstances, it makes no sense for anyone to assert that the worst is over and that the global economy is on the road to recovery.
And the surest sign that all is not well with the big banks is the recent speech by the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley at Princeton, New Jersey when he said that the Fed would curtail the risk of future liquidity crisis by providing a “backstop” to solvent firms with sufficient collateral.
This warning and assurance deserves further consideration. Firstly, it is a contradiction to state that a solvent firm with sufficient collateral would in fact encounter a liquidity crisis to warrant the need for a fall back on the Fed. It is in fact an admission that banks are not sufficiently capitalized and when the second wave of the tsunami hits them again, confidence will be sorely lacking.
Dudley actually said that, “the central bank could commit to being the lender of last resort… [and this would reduce] the risk of panics sparked by uncertainty among lenders about what other creditors think”.
To put it bluntly what he is saying is that the Fed will endeavour to avoid the repeat of the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros and AIG. It is also an indication that the remaining big banks are in trouble.
It is interesting to note that a Bloomberg report in early November revealed that Citigroup Inc and JP Morgan Chase have been hoarding cash. The former has almost doubled its cash holdings to US$244.2 billion. In the case of the latter, the cash hoard amounted to US$453.6 billion. Yet, given this hoarding by the leading banks, the New York Federal Reserve Bank had to reassure the financial community that it is ready to inject massive liquidity to prop up the system.
It should come as no surprise that the value of the dollar is heading south.
When currencies are being debased, volatility in the stock market increases. But the gains are not worth the risks and if anyone is still in the market, they will be wiped out by the 1st quarter of 2010. The S&P may have shot up since the beginning of the year by over 25 per cent but it has been out-performed by gold. The gains have also lagged behind the official US inflation rate. It has in fact delivered a total return after inflation of approximately minus 25 per cent. When Meredith Whitney remarked that, “I don’t know what’s going on in the market right now, because it makes no sense to me”, it is time to get out of the market fast.
In a report to its clients, Sociétté Général warned that public debt would be massive in the next two years – 105 per cent of GDP in the UK, 125 per cent in the US and in Europe and 270 per cent in Japan. Global debt would reach US$45 trillion.
At some point in time, all these debts must be repaid. How will these debts be repaid?
If we go by what Bernanke has been preaching and practising, it means more toilet paper currency will be created to repay the debts.
As a result, debasement of currencies will continue and this will further aggravate existing tensions between the competing economies. And when creditors have enough of this toilet paper scam, expect violent reactions!
By Matthias Chang
Sunday, 22 November 2009 21:12
Many of my friends who have been receiving my e-mail alerts over the last two years have lamented that in recent weeks I have not commented on the state of the global economy. I appreciate their anxiety but they forget that I am not a stock market analyst who is paid to write articles to lure investors back into the market. My website is free and I do not sell a financial newsletter so there is no need for me to churn out daily forecasts or analysis.
However, when the data is compelling and supports an inevitable trend, it is time for another review. This Red Alert is to enable visitors to my website to take appropriate actions to safeguard their wealth and welfare of their families in the coming months.
Since the last quarter of 2008, unrelenting currency warfare has been waged by the key global economies and while this competition thus far has been non-antagonistic, it will soon be antagonistic because the inherent differences are irreconcilable. The consequences to the global economy will be devastating and for the ordinary people, massive unemployment and social unrest are assured.
The policy-makers of these countries faced with the total collapse of the international financial architecture have concluded that the solution, the only solution is quantitative easing (i.e. massive injection of liquidity) to salvage the “too big to fail” banks and reflate their depressed economies. This is best reflected in Bernanke’s candid remark that, “the US government has a technology, called the printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost”.
This is the crux of the problem!
The Irreconcilable Differences
Some two decades ago, it was decided by the global financial elites that the framework for the global economy shall consist of:
1) A global derivative-based financial system, controlled by the US Federal Reserve Bank and its associate global banks in the developed countries.
2) The re-location from the West to the East in the production of goods, principally to China and India to “feed” the developed economies.
The entire system was built on a simple principle, that of a FED-controlled global reserve currency which will be the engine for growth for the global economy. It is essentially an imperialist economic principle.
Once we grasp this fundamental truth, Bernanke’s boast that the “US can produce as many US dollars as it wishes at no cost” takes on a different dimension.
I have talked to so many economists and when asked what is the crux of the present financial problem, they all respond in unison, “it is the global imbalances… the West consumes too much while the East saves too much and consumes not enough”. This is exemplified by the huge US trade deficits on the one part and China’s massive surpluses on the other.
Incredible wisdom and almost everyone echoes this mantra. The recent concluded APEC Summit was no different. This mantra was repeated as well as the call for freer trade between trading nations.
This is a grand hoax. All the current leaders on the world’s stage are corrupted to the rotten core and as such have no interest to call a spade a spade and expose the inherent contradictions within the existing financial system.
The call for a multi-polar world is meaningless when the entire global financial system is based on the unipolar US dollar reserve currency. This is the inherent contradiction within the present system and the problems associated with it cannot be resolved by another global reserve currency based on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as advocated by some countries. It was stillborn, the very moment it was conceived!
The leaders of China, Japan and the oil producing countries of the Middle East are all cursing and pissing about the current situation, but they don’t have the courage of their convictions to spell it out to their countrymen that they have been conned by the financial spin masters from the Fed acting on the instructions from Goldman Sachs.
Tell me which leader would dare admit that they have exchanged the nation’s wealth for toilet papers?
The toilet paper currency pantomime continues.
We have now reached a stalemate in the current currency war, not unlike the situation of the Cold War between the NATO pact countries and the Warsaw pact countries. Both sides were deterred by the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of nuclear wars. The costs to both sides were horrendous and it was only when the Soviet Union could not continue with the pace and cost of maintaining a nuclear deterrent and was forced into bankruptcy that the balance tilted in favour of the NATO alliance.
But it was a pyrrhic victory for the US and it allies. What kept the ability of the US to maintain its military might and outspend the Soviet Union was the right to print toilet paper currency and the acceptance of the US dollar by her allies as the world’s reserve currency.
But why did the countries allied to the US during the Cold War accepted the status quo?
Simple! They were all conned into believing that without the protection of Big Brother and its military outreach, they would be swallowed up by the communist menace. They agreed to march to the tune of the US Pied-Piper.
The next big question – why did the so-called “liberated” former communist allies of the Soviet bloc jump on the bandwagon?
Simple! They all believed in the illusion that was fostered by the global banks, led by Goldman Sachs that trading and selling their goods and services for the toilet paper US reserve currency would ensure untold wealth and prosperity.
But the biggest game in town was the Asia gambit. Japan, after a decade of recession following the burst of her property bubble did not have the means and the capacity to bring the game to the next level as envisaged by the financial architects in Goldman Sachs.
And China was the biggest beneficiary. The senior management of Goldman Sachs brokered a secret pact with China’s leaders that in exchange for orchestrating the most massive injection of US dollar capital and wholesale re-location of manufacturing capacity in the history of the global economy, China would recycle their hard-earned US toilet paper reserve currency wealth into US treasuries and other US debt instruments.
This was the necessary condition precedent for the global financial casino to rise to the next level of play.
Why?
The New Game
The financial architects at Goldman Sachs had a master plan – to dominate the global financial system. The means to achieve this financial power was the Shadow Banking System, the lynchpin being the derivative market and the securitization of assets, real and synthetic. The stakes would be huge, in the hundreds of US$ trillions and the way to transform the market was through massive leverage at all levels of the financial game.
But there was an inherent weakness in the overall scheme – the threat of inflation, more precisely hyperinflation. Such huge amount of liquidity in the system would invariably trigger the depreciation of the reserve currency and the confidence in the system.
Hence the need for a system to keep in check price inflation and the illusion that the purchasing power of the toilet paper reserve currency could be maintained.
This is where China came in. Once China became the world’s factory, the problem would be resolved. When a suit which previously cost US$600 could be had for less than US$100, and a pair of shoes for less than US$5, the scam masterminds concluded that there would be no foreseeable threat to the largest casino operation in history.
China agreed to the exchange as it has over a billion mouths to feed and jobs for hundreds of millions needed to be secured, without which the system could not be maintained. But China was pragmatic enough to have two “economic systems” – a Yuan based domestic economy and a US$ based export economy, in the hope that the profits and benefits of the export economy would enable China to transform and establish a viable and dynamic domestic market which in time would replace the export dependent economy. It was a deal made with the devil, but there were no viable alternative options at the material time, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Next Level of the Game
The next level of the game was reached when the toilet paper reserve currency literally went virtual – through the simple operation of a click of the mouse in the computers of the global banks.
The big boys at Goldman Sachs and other global banks were more than content to leave Las Vegas for the mafia and their miserable billions in turnover. The profits were considered dimes when compared to the hundreds of trillions generated by the virtual casino. It was a financial conquest beyond their wildest dreams. They even called themselves, “Master of the Universe”. Creating massive debts was the new game, and the big boys could even leverage more than 40 times capital! Asset values soared with so much liquidity chasing so few good assets.
However, the financial wizards failed to appreciate and or underestimate the amount of financial products that were needed to keep the game in play. They resorted to financial engineering – the securitization of assets. And when real assets were insufficient for securitization, synthetic assets were created. Soon enough, toxic waste was even considered as legitimate instruments for the game so long as it could be unloaded to greedy suckers with no recourse to the originators of these so-called investments.
For a time, it looked as if the financial wizards have solved the problem of how to feed the global casino monster.
Unfortunately, the music stopped and the bubble burst! And as they say the rest is history.
The Goldman Sach’s Remedy
When losses are in the US$ trillions and whatever assets / capital remaining are in the US$ billions, we have a huge problem – a financial black-hole.
The preferred remedy by the financial masterminds at Goldman Sachs was to create another hoax – that if the big global banks were to fail triggering a systemic collapse, there would be Armageddon. These “too big to fail” banks must be injected with massive amount of virtual monies to recapitalize and get rid of the toxic assets on their balance sheet. The major central banks in the developed countries in cahoots with Goldman Sachs sang the same tune. All sorts of schemes were conjured to legitimize this bailout.
In essence, what transpired was the mere transfer of monies from the left pocket to the right pocket, with the twist that the banks were in fact helping the Government to overcome the financial crisis.
The Fed and key central banks agreed to lend “virtual monies” to the “too big to fail” global banks at zero or near zero interest rate and these banks in turn would “deposit” these monies with the Fed and other central banks at agreed interest rates. These transactions are all mere book entries. Other “loans” from the Fed and central banks (again at zero or near zero interest rates) are used to purchase government debts, these debts being the stimulus monies needed to revive the real economy and create jobs for the growing unemployed. So in essence, these banks are given “free money” to lend to the government at prior agreed interest rates with no risks at all. It is a hoax!
These “monies” are not even the dollar bills, but mere book entries created out of thin air.
So when the Fed injects US$ trillions into the banking system, it merely credits the amount in the accounts of the “too big to fail” banks at the Fed.
When the system is applied to international trade, the same modus operandi is used to pay for the goods imported from China, Japan etc.
For the rest of the world, when buying goods denominated in US$, these countries must produce goods and services, sell them for dollars in order to purchase goods needed in their country. Simply put, they have to earn an income to purchase whatever goods and services needed. In contrast, all that the US needs to do is to create monies out of thin air and use them to pay for their imports!
The US can get away with this scam because it has the military muscle to compel and enforce this hoax. As stated earlier, this status quo was accepted especially during the Cold War and with some reluctance post the collapse of the Soviet Union, but with a proviso – that the US agrees to be the consumer of last resort. This arrangement provided some comfort because countries which have sold their goods to the US, can now use the dollars to buy goods from other countries as more than 80 per cent of world trade is denominated in dollars especially crude oil, the lifeline of the global economy.
But with the US in full bankruptcy and its citizens (the largest consumers in the world) being unable to borrow further monies to buy fancy goods from China, Japan and the rest of the world, the demand for dollar has evaporated. The dollar status as a reserve currency and its usefulness is being questioned more vocally.
The End Game
The present fallout can be summarized in simple terms:
Should a bankrupt (the US) be allowed to use money created out of thin air to pay for goods produced with the sweat and tears of hardworking citizens of exporting countries? Adding insult to injury, the same dollars are now purchasing a lot less than before. So what is the use of being paid in a currency that is losing rapidly its value?
On the other hand, the US is telling the whole world, especially the Chinese that if they are not happy with the status quo, there is nothing to stop them from selling to the other countries and accepting their currencies. But if they want to sell to the mighty USA, they must accept US toilet paper reserve currency and its right to create monies out of thin air!
This is the ultimate poker game and whosoever blinks first loses and will suffer irreparable financial consequences. But who has the winning hand?
The US does not have the winning hand. Neither has China the winning hand.
This state of affairs cannot continue for long, for whatever cards the US or China may be contemplating to throw at the table to gain strategic advantage, any short term gains will be pyrrhic, for it will not be able to address the underlying antagonistic contradictions.
When the survival of the system is dependent on the availability of credit (i.e. accumulating more debts) it is only a matter of time before both the debtor and creditor come to the inevitable conclusion that the debt will never be paid. And unless the creditor is willing to write off the debt, resorting to drastic means to collect the outstanding debt is inevitable.
It would be naïve to think that the US would quietly allow itself to be foreclosed! When we reach that stage, war will be inevitable. It will be the US-UK-Israel Axis against the rest of the world.
The Prelude to the End Game
The US economy will be spiraling out of control in the coming months and will reach critical point by the end of the 1st quarter 2010 and implode by the 2nd quarter.
The massive US$ trillions of dollars stimulus has failed to turn the economy around. The massive blood transfusion may have kept the patient alive, but there are numerous signs of multi-organ failure.
There will be another wave of foreclosures of residential and more importantly commercial properties by end December and early 2010. And the foreclosed properties in 2009 will lead to depressed prices once they come through the pipeline. Home and commercial property values will plunge. Banks’ balance sheets will turn ugly and whatever “record profits” in the last two quarters of 2009 will not cover the additional red ink.
Given the above situation, will the Fed continue to buy mortgage-backed securities to prop up the markets? The Fed has already spent trillions buying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages with no potential substitute buyer in sight. Therefore, the Fed’s balance sheet is as toxic as the “too big to fail” banks that it rescued.
In the circumstances, it makes no sense for anyone to assert that the worst is over and that the global economy is on the road to recovery.
And the surest sign that all is not well with the big banks is the recent speech by the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley at Princeton, New Jersey when he said that the Fed would curtail the risk of future liquidity crisis by providing a “backstop” to solvent firms with sufficient collateral.
This warning and assurance deserves further consideration. Firstly, it is a contradiction to state that a solvent firm with sufficient collateral would in fact encounter a liquidity crisis to warrant the need for a fall back on the Fed. It is in fact an admission that banks are not sufficiently capitalized and when the second wave of the tsunami hits them again, confidence will be sorely lacking.
Dudley actually said that, “the central bank could commit to being the lender of last resort… [and this would reduce] the risk of panics sparked by uncertainty among lenders about what other creditors think”.
To put it bluntly what he is saying is that the Fed will endeavour to avoid the repeat of the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros and AIG. It is also an indication that the remaining big banks are in trouble.
It is interesting to note that a Bloomberg report in early November revealed that Citigroup Inc and JP Morgan Chase have been hoarding cash. The former has almost doubled its cash holdings to US$244.2 billion. In the case of the latter, the cash hoard amounted to US$453.6 billion. Yet, given this hoarding by the leading banks, the New York Federal Reserve Bank had to reassure the financial community that it is ready to inject massive liquidity to prop up the system.
It should come as no surprise that the value of the dollar is heading south.
When currencies are being debased, volatility in the stock market increases. But the gains are not worth the risks and if anyone is still in the market, they will be wiped out by the 1st quarter of 2010. The S&P may have shot up since the beginning of the year by over 25 per cent but it has been out-performed by gold. The gains have also lagged behind the official US inflation rate. It has in fact delivered a total return after inflation of approximately minus 25 per cent. When Meredith Whitney remarked that, “I don’t know what’s going on in the market right now, because it makes no sense to me”, it is time to get out of the market fast.
In a report to its clients, Sociétté Général warned that public debt would be massive in the next two years – 105 per cent of GDP in the UK, 125 per cent in the US and in Europe and 270 per cent in Japan. Global debt would reach US$45 trillion.
At some point in time, all these debts must be repaid. How will these debts be repaid?
If we go by what Bernanke has been preaching and practising, it means more toilet paper currency will be created to repay the debts.
As a result, debasement of currencies will continue and this will further aggravate existing tensions between the competing economies. And when creditors have enough of this toilet paper scam, expect violent reactions!
RED ALERT !
Red Alert: The Second Wave of The Financial Tsunami - The Wave Is Gathering Force and Is Most Likely to Hit the Global Economy Between the First and Second Quarter of 2010. Count On It! - By Matthias Chang (23/11/09)
By Matthias Chang
Sunday, 22 November 2009 21:12
Many of my friends who have been receiving my e-mail alerts over the last two years have lamented that in recent weeks I have not commented on the state of the global economy. I appreciate their anxiety but they forget that I am not a stock market analyst who is paid to write articles to lure investors back into the market. My website is free and I do not sell a financial newsletter so there is no need for me to churn out daily forecasts or analysis.
However, when the data is compelling and supports an inevitable trend, it is time for another review. This Red Alert is to enable visitors to my website to take appropriate actions to safeguard their wealth and welfare of their families in the coming months.
Since the last quarter of 2008, unrelenting currency warfare has been waged by the key global economies and while this competition thus far has been non-antagonistic, it will soon be antagonistic because the inherent differences are irreconcilable. The consequences to the global economy will be devastating and for the ordinary people, massive unemployment and social unrest are assured.
The policy-makers of these countries faced with the total collapse of the international financial architecture have concluded that the solution, the only solution is quantitative easing (i.e. massive injection of liquidity) to salvage the “too big to fail” banks and reflate their depressed economies. This is best reflected in Bernanke’s candid remark that, “the US government has a technology, called the printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost”.
This is the crux of the problem!
The Irreconcilable Differences
Some two decades ago, it was decided by the global financial elites that the framework for the global economy shall consist of:
1) A global derivative-based financial system, controlled by the US Federal Reserve Bank and its associate global banks in the developed countries.
2) The re-location from the West to the East in the production of goods, principally to China and India to “feed” the developed economies.
The entire system was built on a simple principle, that of a FED-controlled global reserve currency which will be the engine for growth for the global economy. It is essentially an imperialist economic principle.
Once we grasp this fundamental truth, Bernanke’s boast that the “US can produce as many US dollars as it wishes at no cost” takes on a different dimension.
I have talked to so many economists and when asked what is the crux of the present financial problem, they all respond in unison, “it is the global imbalances… the West consumes too much while the East saves too much and consumes not enough”. This is exemplified by the huge US trade deficits on the one part and China’s massive surpluses on the other.
Incredible wisdom and almost everyone echoes this mantra. The recent concluded APEC Summit was no different. This mantra was repeated as well as the call for freer trade between trading nations.
This is a grand hoax. All the current leaders on the world’s stage are corrupted to the rotten core and as such have no interest to call a spade a spade and expose the inherent contradictions within the existing financial system.
The call for a multi-polar world is meaningless when the entire global financial system is based on the unipolar US dollar reserve currency. This is the inherent contradiction within the present system and the problems associated with it cannot be resolved by another global reserve currency based on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as advocated by some countries. It was stillborn, the very moment it was conceived!
The leaders of China, Japan and the oil producing countries of the Middle East are all cursing and pissing about the current situation, but they don’t have the courage of their convictions to spell it out to their countrymen that they have been conned by the financial spin masters from the Fed acting on the instructions from Goldman Sachs.
Tell me which leader would dare admit that they have exchanged the nation’s wealth for toilet papers?
The toilet paper currency pantomime continues.
We have now reached a stalemate in the current currency war, not unlike the situation of the Cold War between the NATO pact countries and the Warsaw pact countries. Both sides were deterred by the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of nuclear wars. The costs to both sides were horrendous and it was only when the Soviet Union could not continue with the pace and cost of maintaining a nuclear deterrent and was forced into bankruptcy that the balance tilted in favour of the NATO alliance.
But it was a pyrrhic victory for the US and it allies. What kept the ability of the US to maintain its military might and outspend the Soviet Union was the right to print toilet paper currency and the acceptance of the US dollar by her allies as the world’s reserve currency.
But why did the countries allied to the US during the Cold War accepted the status quo?
Simple! They were all conned into believing that without the protection of Big Brother and its military outreach, they would be swallowed up by the communist menace. They agreed to march to the tune of the US Pied-Piper.
The next big question – why did the so-called “liberated” former communist allies of the Soviet bloc jump on the bandwagon?
Simple! They all believed in the illusion that was fostered by the global banks, led by Goldman Sachs that trading and selling their goods and services for the toilet paper US reserve currency would ensure untold wealth and prosperity.
But the biggest game in town was the Asia gambit. Japan, after a decade of recession following the burst of her property bubble did not have the means and the capacity to bring the game to the next level as envisaged by the financial architects in Goldman Sachs.
And China was the biggest beneficiary. The senior management of Goldman Sachs brokered a secret pact with China’s leaders that in exchange for orchestrating the most massive injection of US dollar capital and wholesale re-location of manufacturing capacity in the history of the global economy, China would recycle their hard-earned US toilet paper reserve currency wealth into US treasuries and other US debt instruments.
This was the necessary condition precedent for the global financial casino to rise to the next level of play.
Why?
The New Game
The financial architects at Goldman Sachs had a master plan – to dominate the global financial system. The means to achieve this financial power was the Shadow Banking System, the lynchpin being the derivative market and the securitization of assets, real and synthetic. The stakes would be huge, in the hundreds of US$ trillions and the way to transform the market was through massive leverage at all levels of the financial game.
But there was an inherent weakness in the overall scheme – the threat of inflation, more precisely hyperinflation. Such huge amount of liquidity in the system would invariably trigger the depreciation of the reserve currency and the confidence in the system.
Hence the need for a system to keep in check price inflation and the illusion that the purchasing power of the toilet paper reserve currency could be maintained.
This is where China came in. Once China became the world’s factory, the problem would be resolved. When a suit which previously cost US$600 could be had for less than US$100, and a pair of shoes for less than US$5, the scam masterminds concluded that there would be no foreseeable threat to the largest casino operation in history.
China agreed to the exchange as it has over a billion mouths to feed and jobs for hundreds of millions needed to be secured, without which the system could not be maintained. But China was pragmatic enough to have two “economic systems” – a Yuan based domestic economy and a US$ based export economy, in the hope that the profits and benefits of the export economy would enable China to transform and establish a viable and dynamic domestic market which in time would replace the export dependent economy. It was a deal made with the devil, but there were no viable alternative options at the material time, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Next Level of the Game
The next level of the game was reached when the toilet paper reserve currency literally went virtual – through the simple operation of a click of the mouse in the computers of the global banks.
The big boys at Goldman Sachs and other global banks were more than content to leave Las Vegas for the mafia and their miserable billions in turnover. The profits were considered dimes when compared to the hundreds of trillions generated by the virtual casino. It was a financial conquest beyond their wildest dreams. They even called themselves, “Master of the Universe”. Creating massive debts was the new game, and the big boys could even leverage more than 40 times capital! Asset values soared with so much liquidity chasing so few good assets.
However, the financial wizards failed to appreciate and or underestimate the amount of financial products that were needed to keep the game in play. They resorted to financial engineering – the securitization of assets. And when real assets were insufficient for securitization, synthetic assets were created. Soon enough, toxic waste was even considered as legitimate instruments for the game so long as it could be unloaded to greedy suckers with no recourse to the originators of these so-called investments.
For a time, it looked as if the financial wizards have solved the problem of how to feed the global casino monster.
Unfortunately, the music stopped and the bubble burst! And as they say the rest is history.
The Goldman Sach’s Remedy
When losses are in the US$ trillions and whatever assets / capital remaining are in the US$ billions, we have a huge problem – a financial black-hole.
The preferred remedy by the financial masterminds at Goldman Sachs was to create another hoax – that if the big global banks were to fail triggering a systemic collapse, there would be Armageddon. These “too big to fail” banks must be injected with massive amount of virtual monies to recapitalize and get rid of the toxic assets on their balance sheet. The major central banks in the developed countries in cahoots with Goldman Sachs sang the same tune. All sorts of schemes were conjured to legitimize this bailout.
In essence, what transpired was the mere transfer of monies from the left pocket to the right pocket, with the twist that the banks were in fact helping the Government to overcome the financial crisis.
The Fed and key central banks agreed to lend “virtual monies” to the “too big to fail” global banks at zero or near zero interest rate and these banks in turn would “deposit” these monies with the Fed and other central banks at agreed interest rates. These transactions are all mere book entries. Other “loans” from the Fed and central banks (again at zero or near zero interest rates) are used to purchase government debts, these debts being the stimulus monies needed to revive the real economy and create jobs for the growing unemployed. So in essence, these banks are given “free money” to lend to the government at prior agreed interest rates with no risks at all. It is a hoax!
These “monies” are not even the dollar bills, but mere book entries created out of thin air.
So when the Fed injects US$ trillions into the banking system, it merely credits the amount in the accounts of the “too big to fail” banks at the Fed.
When the system is applied to international trade, the same modus operandi is used to pay for the goods imported from China, Japan etc.
For the rest of the world, when buying goods denominated in US$, these countries must produce goods and services, sell them for dollars in order to purchase goods needed in their country. Simply put, they have to earn an income to purchase whatever goods and services needed. In contrast, all that the US needs to do is to create monies out of thin air and use them to pay for their imports!
The US can get away with this scam because it has the military muscle to compel and enforce this hoax. As stated earlier, this status quo was accepted especially during the Cold War and with some reluctance post the collapse of the Soviet Union, but with a proviso – that the US agrees to be the consumer of last resort. This arrangement provided some comfort because countries which have sold their goods to the US, can now use the dollars to buy goods from other countries as more than 80 per cent of world trade is denominated in dollars especially crude oil, the lifeline of the global economy.
But with the US in full bankruptcy and its citizens (the largest consumers in the world) being unable to borrow further monies to buy fancy goods from China, Japan and the rest of the world, the demand for dollar has evaporated. The dollar status as a reserve currency and its usefulness is being questioned more vocally.
The End Game
The present fallout can be summarized in simple terms:
Should a bankrupt (the US) be allowed to use money created out of thin air to pay for goods produced with the sweat and tears of hardworking citizens of exporting countries? Adding insult to injury, the same dollars are now purchasing a lot less than before. So what is the use of being paid in a currency that is losing rapidly its value?
On the other hand, the US is telling the whole world, especially the Chinese that if they are not happy with the status quo, there is nothing to stop them from selling to the other countries and accepting their currencies. But if they want to sell to the mighty USA, they must accept US toilet paper reserve currency and its right to create monies out of thin air!
This is the ultimate poker game and whosoever blinks first loses and will suffer irreparable financial consequences. But who has the winning hand?
The US does not have the winning hand. Neither has China the winning hand.
This state of affairs cannot continue for long, for whatever cards the US or China may be contemplating to throw at the table to gain strategic advantage, any short term gains will be pyrrhic, for it will not be able to address the underlying antagonistic contradictions.
When the survival of the system is dependent on the availability of credit (i.e. accumulating more debts) it is only a matter of time before both the debtor and creditor come to the inevitable conclusion that the debt will never be paid. And unless the creditor is willing to write off the debt, resorting to drastic means to collect the outstanding debt is inevitable.
It would be naïve to think that the US would quietly allow itself to be foreclosed! When we reach that stage, war will be inevitable. It will be the US-UK-Israel Axis against the rest of the world.
The Prelude to the End Game
The US economy will be spiraling out of control in the coming months and will reach critical point by the end of the 1st quarter 2010 and implode by the 2nd quarter.
The massive US$ trillions of dollars stimulus has failed to turn the economy around. The massive blood transfusion may have kept the patient alive, but there are numerous signs of multi-organ failure.
There will be another wave of foreclosures of residential and more importantly commercial properties by end December and early 2010. And the foreclosed properties in 2009 will lead to depressed prices once they come through the pipeline. Home and commercial property values will plunge. Banks’ balance sheets will turn ugly and whatever “record profits” in the last two quarters of 2009 will not cover the additional red ink.
Given the above situation, will the Fed continue to buy mortgage-backed securities to prop up the markets? The Fed has already spent trillions buying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages with no potential substitute buyer in sight. Therefore, the Fed’s balance sheet is as toxic as the “too big to fail” banks that it rescued.
In the circumstances, it makes no sense for anyone to assert that the worst is over and that the global economy is on the road to recovery.
And the surest sign that all is not well with the big banks is the recent speech by the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley at Princeton, New Jersey when he said that the Fed would curtail the risk of future liquidity crisis by providing a “backstop” to solvent firms with sufficient collateral.
This warning and assurance deserves further consideration. Firstly, it is a contradiction to state that a solvent firm with sufficient collateral would in fact encounter a liquidity crisis to warrant the need for a fall back on the Fed. It is in fact an admission that banks are not sufficiently capitalized and when the second wave of the tsunami hits them again, confidence will be sorely lacking.
Dudley actually said that, “the central bank could commit to being the lender of last resort… [and this would reduce] the risk of panics sparked by uncertainty among lenders about what other creditors think”.
To put it bluntly what he is saying is that the Fed will endeavour to avoid the repeat of the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros and AIG. It is also an indication that the remaining big banks are in trouble.
It is interesting to note that a Bloomberg report in early November revealed that Citigroup Inc and JP Morgan Chase have been hoarding cash. The former has almost doubled its cash holdings to US$244.2 billion. In the case of the latter, the cash hoard amounted to US$453.6 billion. Yet, given this hoarding by the leading banks, the New York Federal Reserve Bank had to reassure the financial community that it is ready to inject massive liquidity to prop up the system.
It should come as no surprise that the value of the dollar is heading south.
When currencies are being debased, volatility in the stock market increases. But the gains are not worth the risks and if anyone is still in the market, they will be wiped out by the 1st quarter of 2010. The S&P may have shot up since the beginning of the year by over 25 per cent but it has been out-performed by gold. The gains have also lagged behind the official US inflation rate. It has in fact delivered a total return after inflation of approximately minus 25 per cent. When Meredith Whitney remarked that, “I don’t know what’s going on in the market right now, because it makes no sense to me”, it is time to get out of the market fast.
In a report to its clients, Sociétté Général warned that public debt would be massive in the next two years – 105 per cent of GDP in the UK, 125 per cent in the US and in Europe and 270 per cent in Japan. Global debt would reach US$45 trillion.
At some point in time, all these debts must be repaid. How will these debts be repaid?
If we go by what Bernanke has been preaching and practising, it means more toilet paper currency will be created to repay the debts.
As a result, debasement of currencies will continue and this will further aggravate existing tensions between the competing economies. And when creditors have enough of this toilet paper scam, expect violent reactions!
By Matthias Chang
Sunday, 22 November 2009 21:12
Many of my friends who have been receiving my e-mail alerts over the last two years have lamented that in recent weeks I have not commented on the state of the global economy. I appreciate their anxiety but they forget that I am not a stock market analyst who is paid to write articles to lure investors back into the market. My website is free and I do not sell a financial newsletter so there is no need for me to churn out daily forecasts or analysis.
However, when the data is compelling and supports an inevitable trend, it is time for another review. This Red Alert is to enable visitors to my website to take appropriate actions to safeguard their wealth and welfare of their families in the coming months.
Since the last quarter of 2008, unrelenting currency warfare has been waged by the key global economies and while this competition thus far has been non-antagonistic, it will soon be antagonistic because the inherent differences are irreconcilable. The consequences to the global economy will be devastating and for the ordinary people, massive unemployment and social unrest are assured.
The policy-makers of these countries faced with the total collapse of the international financial architecture have concluded that the solution, the only solution is quantitative easing (i.e. massive injection of liquidity) to salvage the “too big to fail” banks and reflate their depressed economies. This is best reflected in Bernanke’s candid remark that, “the US government has a technology, called the printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost”.
This is the crux of the problem!
The Irreconcilable Differences
Some two decades ago, it was decided by the global financial elites that the framework for the global economy shall consist of:
1) A global derivative-based financial system, controlled by the US Federal Reserve Bank and its associate global banks in the developed countries.
2) The re-location from the West to the East in the production of goods, principally to China and India to “feed” the developed economies.
The entire system was built on a simple principle, that of a FED-controlled global reserve currency which will be the engine for growth for the global economy. It is essentially an imperialist economic principle.
Once we grasp this fundamental truth, Bernanke’s boast that the “US can produce as many US dollars as it wishes at no cost” takes on a different dimension.
I have talked to so many economists and when asked what is the crux of the present financial problem, they all respond in unison, “it is the global imbalances… the West consumes too much while the East saves too much and consumes not enough”. This is exemplified by the huge US trade deficits on the one part and China’s massive surpluses on the other.
Incredible wisdom and almost everyone echoes this mantra. The recent concluded APEC Summit was no different. This mantra was repeated as well as the call for freer trade between trading nations.
This is a grand hoax. All the current leaders on the world’s stage are corrupted to the rotten core and as such have no interest to call a spade a spade and expose the inherent contradictions within the existing financial system.
The call for a multi-polar world is meaningless when the entire global financial system is based on the unipolar US dollar reserve currency. This is the inherent contradiction within the present system and the problems associated with it cannot be resolved by another global reserve currency based on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as advocated by some countries. It was stillborn, the very moment it was conceived!
The leaders of China, Japan and the oil producing countries of the Middle East are all cursing and pissing about the current situation, but they don’t have the courage of their convictions to spell it out to their countrymen that they have been conned by the financial spin masters from the Fed acting on the instructions from Goldman Sachs.
Tell me which leader would dare admit that they have exchanged the nation’s wealth for toilet papers?
The toilet paper currency pantomime continues.
We have now reached a stalemate in the current currency war, not unlike the situation of the Cold War between the NATO pact countries and the Warsaw pact countries. Both sides were deterred by the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of nuclear wars. The costs to both sides were horrendous and it was only when the Soviet Union could not continue with the pace and cost of maintaining a nuclear deterrent and was forced into bankruptcy that the balance tilted in favour of the NATO alliance.
But it was a pyrrhic victory for the US and it allies. What kept the ability of the US to maintain its military might and outspend the Soviet Union was the right to print toilet paper currency and the acceptance of the US dollar by her allies as the world’s reserve currency.
But why did the countries allied to the US during the Cold War accepted the status quo?
Simple! They were all conned into believing that without the protection of Big Brother and its military outreach, they would be swallowed up by the communist menace. They agreed to march to the tune of the US Pied-Piper.
The next big question – why did the so-called “liberated” former communist allies of the Soviet bloc jump on the bandwagon?
Simple! They all believed in the illusion that was fostered by the global banks, led by Goldman Sachs that trading and selling their goods and services for the toilet paper US reserve currency would ensure untold wealth and prosperity.
But the biggest game in town was the Asia gambit. Japan, after a decade of recession following the burst of her property bubble did not have the means and the capacity to bring the game to the next level as envisaged by the financial architects in Goldman Sachs.
And China was the biggest beneficiary. The senior management of Goldman Sachs brokered a secret pact with China’s leaders that in exchange for orchestrating the most massive injection of US dollar capital and wholesale re-location of manufacturing capacity in the history of the global economy, China would recycle their hard-earned US toilet paper reserve currency wealth into US treasuries and other US debt instruments.
This was the necessary condition precedent for the global financial casino to rise to the next level of play.
Why?
The New Game
The financial architects at Goldman Sachs had a master plan – to dominate the global financial system. The means to achieve this financial power was the Shadow Banking System, the lynchpin being the derivative market and the securitization of assets, real and synthetic. The stakes would be huge, in the hundreds of US$ trillions and the way to transform the market was through massive leverage at all levels of the financial game.
But there was an inherent weakness in the overall scheme – the threat of inflation, more precisely hyperinflation. Such huge amount of liquidity in the system would invariably trigger the depreciation of the reserve currency and the confidence in the system.
Hence the need for a system to keep in check price inflation and the illusion that the purchasing power of the toilet paper reserve currency could be maintained.
This is where China came in. Once China became the world’s factory, the problem would be resolved. When a suit which previously cost US$600 could be had for less than US$100, and a pair of shoes for less than US$5, the scam masterminds concluded that there would be no foreseeable threat to the largest casino operation in history.
China agreed to the exchange as it has over a billion mouths to feed and jobs for hundreds of millions needed to be secured, without which the system could not be maintained. But China was pragmatic enough to have two “economic systems” – a Yuan based domestic economy and a US$ based export economy, in the hope that the profits and benefits of the export economy would enable China to transform and establish a viable and dynamic domestic market which in time would replace the export dependent economy. It was a deal made with the devil, but there were no viable alternative options at the material time, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Next Level of the Game
The next level of the game was reached when the toilet paper reserve currency literally went virtual – through the simple operation of a click of the mouse in the computers of the global banks.
The big boys at Goldman Sachs and other global banks were more than content to leave Las Vegas for the mafia and their miserable billions in turnover. The profits were considered dimes when compared to the hundreds of trillions generated by the virtual casino. It was a financial conquest beyond their wildest dreams. They even called themselves, “Master of the Universe”. Creating massive debts was the new game, and the big boys could even leverage more than 40 times capital! Asset values soared with so much liquidity chasing so few good assets.
However, the financial wizards failed to appreciate and or underestimate the amount of financial products that were needed to keep the game in play. They resorted to financial engineering – the securitization of assets. And when real assets were insufficient for securitization, synthetic assets were created. Soon enough, toxic waste was even considered as legitimate instruments for the game so long as it could be unloaded to greedy suckers with no recourse to the originators of these so-called investments.
For a time, it looked as if the financial wizards have solved the problem of how to feed the global casino monster.
Unfortunately, the music stopped and the bubble burst! And as they say the rest is history.
The Goldman Sach’s Remedy
When losses are in the US$ trillions and whatever assets / capital remaining are in the US$ billions, we have a huge problem – a financial black-hole.
The preferred remedy by the financial masterminds at Goldman Sachs was to create another hoax – that if the big global banks were to fail triggering a systemic collapse, there would be Armageddon. These “too big to fail” banks must be injected with massive amount of virtual monies to recapitalize and get rid of the toxic assets on their balance sheet. The major central banks in the developed countries in cahoots with Goldman Sachs sang the same tune. All sorts of schemes were conjured to legitimize this bailout.
In essence, what transpired was the mere transfer of monies from the left pocket to the right pocket, with the twist that the banks were in fact helping the Government to overcome the financial crisis.
The Fed and key central banks agreed to lend “virtual monies” to the “too big to fail” global banks at zero or near zero interest rate and these banks in turn would “deposit” these monies with the Fed and other central banks at agreed interest rates. These transactions are all mere book entries. Other “loans” from the Fed and central banks (again at zero or near zero interest rates) are used to purchase government debts, these debts being the stimulus monies needed to revive the real economy and create jobs for the growing unemployed. So in essence, these banks are given “free money” to lend to the government at prior agreed interest rates with no risks at all. It is a hoax!
These “monies” are not even the dollar bills, but mere book entries created out of thin air.
So when the Fed injects US$ trillions into the banking system, it merely credits the amount in the accounts of the “too big to fail” banks at the Fed.
When the system is applied to international trade, the same modus operandi is used to pay for the goods imported from China, Japan etc.
For the rest of the world, when buying goods denominated in US$, these countries must produce goods and services, sell them for dollars in order to purchase goods needed in their country. Simply put, they have to earn an income to purchase whatever goods and services needed. In contrast, all that the US needs to do is to create monies out of thin air and use them to pay for their imports!
The US can get away with this scam because it has the military muscle to compel and enforce this hoax. As stated earlier, this status quo was accepted especially during the Cold War and with some reluctance post the collapse of the Soviet Union, but with a proviso – that the US agrees to be the consumer of last resort. This arrangement provided some comfort because countries which have sold their goods to the US, can now use the dollars to buy goods from other countries as more than 80 per cent of world trade is denominated in dollars especially crude oil, the lifeline of the global economy.
But with the US in full bankruptcy and its citizens (the largest consumers in the world) being unable to borrow further monies to buy fancy goods from China, Japan and the rest of the world, the demand for dollar has evaporated. The dollar status as a reserve currency and its usefulness is being questioned more vocally.
The End Game
The present fallout can be summarized in simple terms:
Should a bankrupt (the US) be allowed to use money created out of thin air to pay for goods produced with the sweat and tears of hardworking citizens of exporting countries? Adding insult to injury, the same dollars are now purchasing a lot less than before. So what is the use of being paid in a currency that is losing rapidly its value?
On the other hand, the US is telling the whole world, especially the Chinese that if they are not happy with the status quo, there is nothing to stop them from selling to the other countries and accepting their currencies. But if they want to sell to the mighty USA, they must accept US toilet paper reserve currency and its right to create monies out of thin air!
This is the ultimate poker game and whosoever blinks first loses and will suffer irreparable financial consequences. But who has the winning hand?
The US does not have the winning hand. Neither has China the winning hand.
This state of affairs cannot continue for long, for whatever cards the US or China may be contemplating to throw at the table to gain strategic advantage, any short term gains will be pyrrhic, for it will not be able to address the underlying antagonistic contradictions.
When the survival of the system is dependent on the availability of credit (i.e. accumulating more debts) it is only a matter of time before both the debtor and creditor come to the inevitable conclusion that the debt will never be paid. And unless the creditor is willing to write off the debt, resorting to drastic means to collect the outstanding debt is inevitable.
It would be naïve to think that the US would quietly allow itself to be foreclosed! When we reach that stage, war will be inevitable. It will be the US-UK-Israel Axis against the rest of the world.
The Prelude to the End Game
The US economy will be spiraling out of control in the coming months and will reach critical point by the end of the 1st quarter 2010 and implode by the 2nd quarter.
The massive US$ trillions of dollars stimulus has failed to turn the economy around. The massive blood transfusion may have kept the patient alive, but there are numerous signs of multi-organ failure.
There will be another wave of foreclosures of residential and more importantly commercial properties by end December and early 2010. And the foreclosed properties in 2009 will lead to depressed prices once they come through the pipeline. Home and commercial property values will plunge. Banks’ balance sheets will turn ugly and whatever “record profits” in the last two quarters of 2009 will not cover the additional red ink.
Given the above situation, will the Fed continue to buy mortgage-backed securities to prop up the markets? The Fed has already spent trillions buying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages with no potential substitute buyer in sight. Therefore, the Fed’s balance sheet is as toxic as the “too big to fail” banks that it rescued.
In the circumstances, it makes no sense for anyone to assert that the worst is over and that the global economy is on the road to recovery.
And the surest sign that all is not well with the big banks is the recent speech by the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley at Princeton, New Jersey when he said that the Fed would curtail the risk of future liquidity crisis by providing a “backstop” to solvent firms with sufficient collateral.
This warning and assurance deserves further consideration. Firstly, it is a contradiction to state that a solvent firm with sufficient collateral would in fact encounter a liquidity crisis to warrant the need for a fall back on the Fed. It is in fact an admission that banks are not sufficiently capitalized and when the second wave of the tsunami hits them again, confidence will be sorely lacking.
Dudley actually said that, “the central bank could commit to being the lender of last resort… [and this would reduce] the risk of panics sparked by uncertainty among lenders about what other creditors think”.
To put it bluntly what he is saying is that the Fed will endeavour to avoid the repeat of the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros and AIG. It is also an indication that the remaining big banks are in trouble.
It is interesting to note that a Bloomberg report in early November revealed that Citigroup Inc and JP Morgan Chase have been hoarding cash. The former has almost doubled its cash holdings to US$244.2 billion. In the case of the latter, the cash hoard amounted to US$453.6 billion. Yet, given this hoarding by the leading banks, the New York Federal Reserve Bank had to reassure the financial community that it is ready to inject massive liquidity to prop up the system.
It should come as no surprise that the value of the dollar is heading south.
When currencies are being debased, volatility in the stock market increases. But the gains are not worth the risks and if anyone is still in the market, they will be wiped out by the 1st quarter of 2010. The S&P may have shot up since the beginning of the year by over 25 per cent but it has been out-performed by gold. The gains have also lagged behind the official US inflation rate. It has in fact delivered a total return after inflation of approximately minus 25 per cent. When Meredith Whitney remarked that, “I don’t know what’s going on in the market right now, because it makes no sense to me”, it is time to get out of the market fast.
In a report to its clients, Sociétté Général warned that public debt would be massive in the next two years – 105 per cent of GDP in the UK, 125 per cent in the US and in Europe and 270 per cent in Japan. Global debt would reach US$45 trillion.
At some point in time, all these debts must be repaid. How will these debts be repaid?
If we go by what Bernanke has been preaching and practising, it means more toilet paper currency will be created to repay the debts.
As a result, debasement of currencies will continue and this will further aggravate existing tensions between the competing economies. And when creditors have enough of this toilet paper scam, expect violent reactions!
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Najib’s inner circle
KUALA LUMPUR, July 15 — The people in Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s inner circle;
Tan Sri Peter Sondakh
Sondakh advises Najib on Indonesia.
He came into contact with Najib when he was negotiating to sell a controlling interest in his telecommunications group, Excelcomindo Pratama, to Malaysia’s national telecommunications company Telekom Malaysia in 2004.
Flush with cash from the sale of his telecommunications group, Sondakh, now 57, acquired hotels in Malaysia, including the Sheraton Imperial. The latter was owned by a financially troubled unit controlled by Telekom Malaysia’s parent company Khazanah Holdings, the country’s state-owned investment agency.
Since then, Sondakh has emerged as an informal personal adviser to Najib on matters related to Indonesia.
Omar Mustapha Ong
Omar was Najib’s aide when he was DPM.
The one-time special assistant to Najib owns a business consultancy called Ethos & Co.
Omar, who is 38 years old, also has links with Sondakh.
The two struck up a relationship several years ago when Omar was assigned by Najib, then Deputy PM, to build a network in Indonesia, which was identified as a potential investment destination for Malaysian companies, particularly state controlled enterprises.
Businessmen who know Omar say that he is being tapped for strategic advice.
He is also said to be the architect of the Premier’s “1 Malaysia” slogan — a call for a more united Malaysia, which has become the central theme of Najib’s first 100 days in office.
But Omar, who graduated from Oxford, has been ensnared in a controversy in recent weeks after the board of the national oil corporation Petronas rebuffed a proposal by Najib to appoint his young aide as a director.
Bankers and lawyers familiar with the situation say that the board of directors of Petronas opposed Omar’s position because he failed to honour his scholarship agreement with the oil corporation after it financed his studies in Britain.
After graduating in the mid-1990s, he worked briefly in Petronas and another government-linked corporation before joining consultancy firm McKinsey.
He left it to set up Ethos in early 2002 with several friends, and two years later was appointed Najib’s special officer in the DPM’s Office.
Omar did not respond to requests for comment.
Siew Ka Wei
Siew controls several public-listed entities.
The businessman and Datuk Mohamed Al-Amin Abdul Majid, a senior politician from the ruling Umno, are said to be close to completing a takeover of a 70 per cent interest in a private company that owns the Malay Mail.
Political handovers in Malaysia often result in changes in the top positions in the country’s mainstream media organisations and this is one change on the cards.
The lanky, cigar-chomping Datuk Siew, 53, is a controlling shareholder of several public-listed entities such as Nylex and Ancom.
Al-Amin, who is also 53, is a board member of both firms.
Tan Sri Tan Kay Hock
Tan is said to be a golf buddy of the PM.
He is the low-profile controlling shareholder of Johan Holdings, a public-listed investment holding company, and said to be a golf buddy of Najib’s.
The Financial Times had reported that Tan, 61, was the owner of the 607ha Guiana Island, which is now at the centre of a fraud case brought by the United States authorities against Texan billionaire businessman Allen Stanford.
Jho Low
Another low-profile businessman, he was a key architect of a multibillion-ringgit sovereign wealth fund established by the state of Terengganu.
The fund, called the Terengganu Investment Authority (TIA), has sparked controversy because it will be created using borrowed money and not existing capital held by the state. It will raise capital from a RM5 billion bond issue, which will be guaranteed by the Malaysian government.
Little is known of Penang-born Low, who a TIA official said is an adviser to Malaysia’s King, Sultan Mizan, and has close ties with several Middle East investment funds. — The Straits Times
Tan Sri Peter Sondakh
Sondakh advises Najib on Indonesia.
He came into contact with Najib when he was negotiating to sell a controlling interest in his telecommunications group, Excelcomindo Pratama, to Malaysia’s national telecommunications company Telekom Malaysia in 2004.
Flush with cash from the sale of his telecommunications group, Sondakh, now 57, acquired hotels in Malaysia, including the Sheraton Imperial. The latter was owned by a financially troubled unit controlled by Telekom Malaysia’s parent company Khazanah Holdings, the country’s state-owned investment agency.
Since then, Sondakh has emerged as an informal personal adviser to Najib on matters related to Indonesia.
Omar Mustapha Ong
Omar was Najib’s aide when he was DPM.
The one-time special assistant to Najib owns a business consultancy called Ethos & Co.
Omar, who is 38 years old, also has links with Sondakh.
The two struck up a relationship several years ago when Omar was assigned by Najib, then Deputy PM, to build a network in Indonesia, which was identified as a potential investment destination for Malaysian companies, particularly state controlled enterprises.
Businessmen who know Omar say that he is being tapped for strategic advice.
He is also said to be the architect of the Premier’s “1 Malaysia” slogan — a call for a more united Malaysia, which has become the central theme of Najib’s first 100 days in office.
But Omar, who graduated from Oxford, has been ensnared in a controversy in recent weeks after the board of the national oil corporation Petronas rebuffed a proposal by Najib to appoint his young aide as a director.
Bankers and lawyers familiar with the situation say that the board of directors of Petronas opposed Omar’s position because he failed to honour his scholarship agreement with the oil corporation after it financed his studies in Britain.
After graduating in the mid-1990s, he worked briefly in Petronas and another government-linked corporation before joining consultancy firm McKinsey.
He left it to set up Ethos in early 2002 with several friends, and two years later was appointed Najib’s special officer in the DPM’s Office.
Omar did not respond to requests for comment.
Siew Ka Wei
Siew controls several public-listed entities.
The businessman and Datuk Mohamed Al-Amin Abdul Majid, a senior politician from the ruling Umno, are said to be close to completing a takeover of a 70 per cent interest in a private company that owns the Malay Mail.
Political handovers in Malaysia often result in changes in the top positions in the country’s mainstream media organisations and this is one change on the cards.
The lanky, cigar-chomping Datuk Siew, 53, is a controlling shareholder of several public-listed entities such as Nylex and Ancom.
Al-Amin, who is also 53, is a board member of both firms.
Tan Sri Tan Kay Hock
Tan is said to be a golf buddy of the PM.
He is the low-profile controlling shareholder of Johan Holdings, a public-listed investment holding company, and said to be a golf buddy of Najib’s.
The Financial Times had reported that Tan, 61, was the owner of the 607ha Guiana Island, which is now at the centre of a fraud case brought by the United States authorities against Texan billionaire businessman Allen Stanford.
Jho Low
Another low-profile businessman, he was a key architect of a multibillion-ringgit sovereign wealth fund established by the state of Terengganu.
The fund, called the Terengganu Investment Authority (TIA), has sparked controversy because it will be created using borrowed money and not existing capital held by the state. It will raise capital from a RM5 billion bond issue, which will be guaranteed by the Malaysian government.
Little is known of Penang-born Low, who a TIA official said is an adviser to Malaysia’s King, Sultan Mizan, and has close ties with several Middle East investment funds. — The Straits Times
Thursday, November 05, 2009
India and China as the new economic powerhouses, taking over from US and UK?
What Is India and China Doing That Malaysia Has Neglected To Do? - By Matthias Chang (5/11/09)
By Matthias Chang
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 21:44
On 27th August 2009 I wrote an article, “An Appeal To Malaysia’s Prime Minister Cum Finance Minister – Re-Examine the Country’s Strategy For Foreign Reserves”, to urge our Prime Minister to examine the critical need to diversify our foreign reserves, specifically to increase our holdings of gold.
My call was unheeded.
I drew the attention of our Prime Minister to the 14th August 2009 Central Banks Gold Agreement (CBGA) specifically:
“Gold will remain an important element of global monetary reserves.”
• The gold sales already decided and to be decided by the undersigned institutions will be achieved through a concerted program of sales over a period of five years, starting on 27th September 2009, immediately after the end of the previous agreement. Annual sales will not exceed 400 tonnes and total sales over this period will not exceed 2000 tonnes.
• The signatories recognize the intention of the IMF to sell 403 tonnes of gold and noted that such sales can be accommodated within the above ceilings.
• This agreement will be reviewed after five years.
“It is significant to note that the IMF intends to sell 403 tonnes of gold and it is a no-brainer to venture a guess as to who will be the main buyer. China is desperate to unload its US toilet papers for gold and it has to be done carefully, as such sales ‘will be accommodated within the above ceilings.’ ”
I also drew the attention of the Prime Minister to the following data:
“The current situation of key European Central Banks’ gold reserves as a percentage of their total reserves are as follows:
France: 73%
Germany: 69.5%
Italy: 66.1%
Netherlands: 61.4%
Switzerland: 37.1%
In contrast, the key Asian Central Banks’ and Russia’s gold reserves are as follows:
Russia: 4%
India: 4%
Taiwan: 3.8%
Japan: 2.1%
China: 1.8%
Given this state of affairs, any sales by European central banks under the 3rd CBGA will not depress gold prices, as it will be inevitable for the underweighted Asian central banks to pick them up so as to bolster their miniscule reserves in gold. For more data, please reference World Gold Council.”
China has taken heed of the need to bolster her strategic reserves of gold. She has in fact called upon her citizens to accumulate gold!
Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that, “Gold jumped to a record after India's central bank bought 200 metric tons of the metal from the International Monetary Fund, heightening speculation about more official purchases… The $6.7 billion sale to the Reserve Bank of India is 'the biggest single central-bank purchase that we know about for at least 30 years in such a short period,' said Timothy Green, author of 'The Ages of Gold.' 'The only comparable event was the U.S.'s steady purchases in the 1930s and 1940s.'”
What is significant is that India has taken up 50% of the IMF‘s allocation of 403 tonnes.
India has now come on board to the need to diversify their foreign reserves.
I believe that in the months to come, other Asian central banks will follow this lead.
I hope Malaysia will not remain in a state of denial.
And once again, I have shown to be ahead of the curve. By the first quarter of 2010, we will witness the 2nd wave of the global financial tsunami. The hoarding of cash by the global big banks will not be enough to stem the tide.
The 2nd global financial tsunami will be bigger and more devastating than the first. Be forewarned.
Malaysia’s recent budget has not addressed the fundamental issues.
By Matthias Chang
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 21:44
On 27th August 2009 I wrote an article, “An Appeal To Malaysia’s Prime Minister Cum Finance Minister – Re-Examine the Country’s Strategy For Foreign Reserves”, to urge our Prime Minister to examine the critical need to diversify our foreign reserves, specifically to increase our holdings of gold.
My call was unheeded.
I drew the attention of our Prime Minister to the 14th August 2009 Central Banks Gold Agreement (CBGA) specifically:
“Gold will remain an important element of global monetary reserves.”
• The gold sales already decided and to be decided by the undersigned institutions will be achieved through a concerted program of sales over a period of five years, starting on 27th September 2009, immediately after the end of the previous agreement. Annual sales will not exceed 400 tonnes and total sales over this period will not exceed 2000 tonnes.
• The signatories recognize the intention of the IMF to sell 403 tonnes of gold and noted that such sales can be accommodated within the above ceilings.
• This agreement will be reviewed after five years.
“It is significant to note that the IMF intends to sell 403 tonnes of gold and it is a no-brainer to venture a guess as to who will be the main buyer. China is desperate to unload its US toilet papers for gold and it has to be done carefully, as such sales ‘will be accommodated within the above ceilings.’ ”
I also drew the attention of the Prime Minister to the following data:
“The current situation of key European Central Banks’ gold reserves as a percentage of their total reserves are as follows:
France: 73%
Germany: 69.5%
Italy: 66.1%
Netherlands: 61.4%
Switzerland: 37.1%
In contrast, the key Asian Central Banks’ and Russia’s gold reserves are as follows:
Russia: 4%
India: 4%
Taiwan: 3.8%
Japan: 2.1%
China: 1.8%
Given this state of affairs, any sales by European central banks under the 3rd CBGA will not depress gold prices, as it will be inevitable for the underweighted Asian central banks to pick them up so as to bolster their miniscule reserves in gold. For more data, please reference World Gold Council.”
China has taken heed of the need to bolster her strategic reserves of gold. She has in fact called upon her citizens to accumulate gold!
Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that, “Gold jumped to a record after India's central bank bought 200 metric tons of the metal from the International Monetary Fund, heightening speculation about more official purchases… The $6.7 billion sale to the Reserve Bank of India is 'the biggest single central-bank purchase that we know about for at least 30 years in such a short period,' said Timothy Green, author of 'The Ages of Gold.' 'The only comparable event was the U.S.'s steady purchases in the 1930s and 1940s.'”
What is significant is that India has taken up 50% of the IMF‘s allocation of 403 tonnes.
India has now come on board to the need to diversify their foreign reserves.
I believe that in the months to come, other Asian central banks will follow this lead.
I hope Malaysia will not remain in a state of denial.
And once again, I have shown to be ahead of the curve. By the first quarter of 2010, we will witness the 2nd wave of the global financial tsunami. The hoarding of cash by the global big banks will not be enough to stem the tide.
The 2nd global financial tsunami will be bigger and more devastating than the first. Be forewarned.
Malaysia’s recent budget has not addressed the fundamental issues.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Asian Renaissance Generation Wave
Generasi gelombang kebangkitan Asia
Oleh: Eekmal Ahmad
NOV 2 — Dari segala deretan memori, izinkan saya kongsi bersama cebisan ini. Semuanya bermula pada tahun 1999. Berbekalkan duit dari PTPTN yang saya simpan berdikit-dikit, akhirnya tertunailah hasrat untuk memiliki sebuah motosikal Honda model EX5. Ianya memudahkan untuk saya bergerak ke sana ke mari, juga untuk aktiviti pergerakan mahasiswa Islam di Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Motosikal itu kiranya dibenarkan untuk berbicara, pastinya banyak cerita saya terbongkar, yang manis, pahit, gembira, ketawa dan menangis.
Selepas melalui beberapa peringkat tarbiyah, bersenjatakan motosikal Honda itu, saya dan rakan-rakan sering ke Kuala Lumpur untuk menyertai demonstrasi. Baik demonstrasi tersebut menyanggah kewujudan sebuah kerajaan yang diterajui Umno-Barisan Nasional ataupun membantah aktiviti dan acara, yang pada pendapat kami bertentangan dengan hukum syarak. Negara Islam wajib ditegakkan, dan Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim yang masih merengkok dalam penjara bukanlah tokoh yang wajar dipercayai. Kecurigaan ini, mengikut perkiraan saya, adalah mirip kecurigaan al Ikhwan al Muslimoon terhadap Gammal Abdel Naser. Apa yang pasti kami sentiasa bergelora, idealistik dan yakin, kemenangan pada suatu hari milik kami.
Di pertengahan jalan, saya tertewas, hilang pertimbangan, lalu menamatkan pengajian undang-undang saya di UKM. Beberapa ketika, saya pulang ke Alor Star, tetap setia bersama motosikal EX5. Buat menenangkan hati, sering saya berulang alik, sudah tentu bersama motosikal setia, ke pondok Dehrang mendengar kuliah Ustaz Nuruddin Al Banjari dan Ustaz Fahmi Zam Zam. Memperoleh ketenangan dan sokongan ibu bapa, permohonan memasuki kuliah undang-undang UiTM diajukan. Tahun 2002, ianya bermula kembali. Saya ke Shah Alam menjadi pelajar fakulti undang-undang walaupun minat untuk menjadi seorang peguam sudahpun padam.
Ketika masa “pemulihan” di Alor Star, oleh kerana kemaruk mendapatkan bahan bacaan, Berita Keadilan yang dipimpin Khalid Jaafar adalah antara bacaan wajib selain dari kitab-kitab fiqh dan Tafsir al Azhar. Minat itu saya teruskan ketika di Shah Alam. Ligat saya mengelilingi bandar tersebut mencari Berita Keadilan buat menghilangkan ketagihan. Tulisan dan wacana yang dicetus menggasak saya memikirkan kembali beberapa keyakinan serta sikap perjuangan. Saya mulai menaruh minat untuk mengenali Anwar Ibrahim. Tapi melalui apa? Makanya berbekalkan duit, sekitar RM30 dan motosikal itu, saya mencapai nashkah “Asian Renaissance,” karya versi Inggeris mantan timbalan perdana menteri, yang dihumban ke dalam penjara, di toko buku berdekatan. Dan buku itu menemani saya siang dan malam.
Secara tiba-tiba perasaan cemburu menyerang saya. Bibliografinya mengejek-ngejek saya. Senarai nama seperti Syed Naguib al Attas, Syed Hussein al Attas, Karl Popper, Tagore, T.S. Eliot, Sutan Takdir dan Dead European Males lainnya menerbitkan resah berpanjangan. Perpustakaan diserbu, mencari buku-buku yang ditulis oleh mereka semua dengan nafsu yang bergelojak. Kerap kali pemburuan berakhir dengan kekecewaan dan sumpah seranah. Misalnya “The Open Society and Its Enemies” karya Karl Popper, pemikir dari Vienna, langsung tidak terdapat di rak-rak buku perpustakaan. Bagi saya ianya adalah antara mehnah dan tribulasi yang paling besar pernah saya hadapi.
Perlahan-lahan gagasan Nahdah Asia Anwar Ibrahim menjelma. Meratib saya mengingati di antara pesan Gelombang Kebangkitan Asia (judul versi Melayu); “the cultivation of good taste takes the place of mediocrity and philistinism.” Mengunyah bab demi bab seperti Keunggulan Budaya, Ekonomi Manusiawi, Timur dan Barat serta Demokrasi dan Masyarakat Madani, merubah saya menjadi insan yang yakin. Kini saya menyendiri ber-”usrah” dengan membedah dan menghadam satu demi satu faham yang terkandung di dalam Gelombang Kebangkitan Asia. Ke “Melayu”-an dan Ke-“Islam”-an tidak menghalang saya dari menerobos tembok khusus intelektualisme yang selalu dikaitkan dengan golongan kelas menengah dan tinggi. Akar budaya dan juga agama menjadi jendela meneropong Islam dalam Sejarah dan Kebudayaan Melayu, Hamlet, John Keats, perdebatan seputar sekularisme, Ibsen dan FA Hayek.
Gelombang mempertemukan saya dengan sekelompok anak muda ataupun yang berhati muda. Dengan motosikal EX5 itulah saya berulang alik dari Shah Alam ke Telawi, meredah kedinginan malam dan kehangatan petang. Kami yang datang baik dari utara, timur dan selatan tanah air, membentuk komuniti kecil para seniman, penulis, wartawan dan pelajar. Akal, tradisi, kebebasan, moraliti, budaya, kuku besi dan agama menjadi tema perbincangan dan renungan. Usrah baru saya terdiri dari mereka yang fanatik berbahasa Melayu, sering menyeru agar menguasai, bukan sahaja bahasa Inggeris, bahkan bahasa Jerman, Mandarin, Pali dan Greek kuno serta menyanggah ketuanan perkauman yang meminggirkan etnik lainnya.
Rasa rendah diri disingkir jauh-jauh. Syarahan Karamah Insaniah, Pico della Mirandola bahawa “tiada yang lebih dikagumi selain manusia” bagaikan petir dan guruh yang berdentum di langit. Bingit dan mengejutkan. Gelombang memaksa sekaligus meyakinkan saya bahawa dikotomi di antara timur dan barat semakin kabur. Manakala Kebebasan dari regim yang tirani dan mengangkat martabat Budaya bangsa dari kelaihan berpanjangan merupakan tanggungjawab generasi perubahan; Generasi Gelombang Kebangkitan Asia.
Mulai saat itu saya mengenali, ataupun dengan lebih tepatnya, cuba mengenali sosok Anwar Ibrahim. Sudah tentu tidak sepenuhnya. Akan tetapi saya tidak perlu untuk bersekolah dengannya ataupun mengaku mengenali beliau selama berpuluh-puluh tahun. Cukup buat saya, menyedari serta memahami gagasan-gagasan beliau. Tidak perlu untuk membandingkan Anwar Ibrahim dengan tokoh-tokoh silam seperti Dr Burhanuddin al Helmy, Datuk Onn atau pun Alexander dari Macedonia itu!
Anwar adalah Anwar. Beliau melakar Gagasan Gelombang dan terbukti ampuh meroboh bongkah-bongkah Nilai-nilai Asia anutan beberapa pemimpin tua yang gusar legasi mereka akan lenyap dimamah keyakinan baru. Mentaliti pasca kolonialisme sudah tidak relevan. Sikap secara borongan membenci barat hanya menjadi alasan buat kebanyakan diktator memungkinkan kezaliman di tanah air sendiri. Manakala kita mengkritik pusat tahanan Guantanamo, pada ketika yang sama, negara ini juga memiliki pusat tahanan versinya sendiri di Kamunting.
Sekian lama kita berhadapan dengan politik hipokrasi. Dasar yang menguntungkan sebilangan kecil samada hanya untuk kepuasan elit pemerintah bumiputera ataupun tauke tauke kaya seharusnya ditolak tanpa ragu. Tidak ada justifikasi munasabah untuk kita menerima dalih membantu bangsa sedangkan hanya dua tiga kerat pimpinan barisan nasional sahaja yang kaya raya. Itulah manifestasi tertinggi politik perkauman sempit. Hakikatnya ianya cerita lama yang sudah basi.
Rakyat Malaysia terutamanya anak muda dari segenap lapisan masyarakat, merentasi sempadan agama dan etnik mempunyai kesedaran yang lebih baik dari apa yang disangkakan oleh sesetengah pihak. Pembentukan politik baru sesungguhnya tidak terelakkan. Acuan baru itu akan mengambil tempat, lalu bersaing dan mengalahkan politik lama yang bergantung kepada ketakutan, kecurigaan dan pemisahan antara kaum di negara ini. Kezaliman bukanlah hak milik mana-mana kaum, dan Keadilan adalah untuk semua.
Syaratnya ialah untuk terus beriltizam dengan Perubahan yang mengakar kepada hasrat untuk memelihara keluhuran perlembagaan, membanteras rasuah sehingga ke akar umbi, menjamin kedaulatan undang-undang, pengukuhan masyarakat demokratik dan berakhirnya politik perkauman.
Abad baru akan menjadi saksi, warisan pemerintah yang sekian lama “tahu apa yang terbaik untuk kita” sudah berakhir. Generasi Gelombang adalah kekuatan anak muda, suaranya, suara anak muda dan ianya arus deras yang mampu merubah lanskap politik serta sejarah negara ini. Anak muda mahukan sesuatu yang menyegarkan. Bahasa politik parokial perlu disisihkan. Perubahan yang luhur akan melibatkan semua untuk berbicara. Conversational Democracy adalah ciri penting penciptaan sebuah negara demokratik. Perdebatan dan wacana tidak menjurus kepada ungkapan seperti “pengkhianat bangsa” dan “agen yahudi.”
Generasi Gelombang tidak perlu menjadi apologetik dan mesti berani untuk mengaku bahawa bahasa demokrasi, kebebasan, keunggulan budaya dan pertumbuhan ekonomi yang mampan bukanlah monopoli mana-mana peradaban. Berbekalkan semangat baru, akan kita buktikan ungkapan Kipling bahawa, “There is too much in Asia and it is too old” adalah tidak benar sama sekali. Generasi Gelombang perlu merebut peluang mencipta dan menempa haluan baru buat negara ini.
Namun ini tidak bererti kita berhasrat mencipta yang baru dan terlepas dari pesan-pesan leluhur mahupun tradisi. Penggalian teks-teks klasik bagi saya menemukan kita dengan anjuran dasar untuk mengolah pandang dunia yang segar dan bertepatan dengan semangat zaman. Kebijaksanaan Bendahara Paduka Raja untuk menderhakai perintah Sultan misalnya, menyelamatkan Melaka dari hangus diberengus Jebat. Penulis Hikayat Hang Tuah menganyam cerita dan peri membiarkan pembacanya menilai di antara kesetiaan Hang Tuah, keterlanjuran Jebat, sikap tanpa usul periksa Sultan Melaka dan penderhakaan Bendahara Paduka Raja. Ternyata akhirnya penderhakaan Bendahara jualah yang menyelamatkan rakyat serta kerajaan.
Saya menyanggah beberapa telahan kononnya teks klasik ini menganjurkan taat setia tidak berbelah bahagi kepada pemerintah. Saya juga menolak untuk mengagung-agungkan perbuatan Jebat. Hikayat Hang Tuah adalah antara karya yang menampilkan kejelikan pemerintahan tanpa batasan. Ianya menjadi iktibar kepada kita untuk mencipta sebuah negara yang mempunyai batas-batas jelas untuk melindungi hak rakyat dari digasir pemimpinnya. Ini menguatkan hujah kita untuk menuntut sebuah negara dan masyarakat yang demokratik.
Kecurigaan di antara agama juga perlu dikikis. Islam tidak sewajarnya dipandang sebagai sebuah agama yang kuno, mandul daya intelektualismenya dan zalim semata-mata. Kegagalan penguasa dan sesetengah pemikir Melayu-Islam untuk mengangkat harakat agama adalah antara punca kecurigaan ini bertunas. Keilmuan Islam dan kekayaan tradisi kepustakaan Melayu dibiarkan usang kerana kebanyakan mereka lebih berminat untuk mengejar kerusi-kerusi empuk di institusi pengajian tinggi dan terpasung kerdil menjadi jiwa hamba. Manakala taraf keilmuan dan intelektualisme jauh merosot tatkala wacana-wacana falsafah, ekonomi dan agama yang rancak di luar negara langsung tidak dipedulikan. Kita masih menanti siapakah bakal mampu menandingi Syed Muhammad Naguib al Attas dan Syed Hussein al Attas.
Pilihanraya umum ke 12 menyaksikan Anwar Ibrahim dengan dokongan rakyat berbilang kaum dan agama, berjaya memimpin permuafakatan politik yang berjaya menafikan majoriti dua pertiga barisan nasional. Berbekalkan mesej Perubahan, permuafakatan tersebut berjaya menambat jiwa raga para pengundi. Perubahan secara mendadak menjadi komoditi hangat di pasaran. Saya rasa ini lah kali pertama dalam sejarah moden negara, rakyat Malaysia berada di kedudukan untuk menentukan “harga” dan “tawaran” siapa yang terbaik.
Inilah juga masanya buat kita, Generasi Gelombang menawarkan pakej yang terbaik untuk rakyat. Jelmakan keyakinan kita terhadap sebuah negara madani yang berpaksikan masyarakat demokratik, keluhuran perlembagaan, keunggulan budaya dan kemakmuran ekonomi. Jelaskan kepada rakyat mereka berhak kepada yang terbaik, makanya menjadi tanggungjawab kita untuk menjadi yang terbaik. Sudah tiba masanya kita menjayakan cita-cita “the cultivation of good taste take the place of mediocrity and philistinism.”
Eekmal Ahmad adalah kakitangan Pejabat Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim dan sering mendengar ulasan majalah Monocole, Wired dan Technological Review dari adik lelakinya.
Oleh: Eekmal Ahmad
NOV 2 — Dari segala deretan memori, izinkan saya kongsi bersama cebisan ini. Semuanya bermula pada tahun 1999. Berbekalkan duit dari PTPTN yang saya simpan berdikit-dikit, akhirnya tertunailah hasrat untuk memiliki sebuah motosikal Honda model EX5. Ianya memudahkan untuk saya bergerak ke sana ke mari, juga untuk aktiviti pergerakan mahasiswa Islam di Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Motosikal itu kiranya dibenarkan untuk berbicara, pastinya banyak cerita saya terbongkar, yang manis, pahit, gembira, ketawa dan menangis.
Selepas melalui beberapa peringkat tarbiyah, bersenjatakan motosikal Honda itu, saya dan rakan-rakan sering ke Kuala Lumpur untuk menyertai demonstrasi. Baik demonstrasi tersebut menyanggah kewujudan sebuah kerajaan yang diterajui Umno-Barisan Nasional ataupun membantah aktiviti dan acara, yang pada pendapat kami bertentangan dengan hukum syarak. Negara Islam wajib ditegakkan, dan Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim yang masih merengkok dalam penjara bukanlah tokoh yang wajar dipercayai. Kecurigaan ini, mengikut perkiraan saya, adalah mirip kecurigaan al Ikhwan al Muslimoon terhadap Gammal Abdel Naser. Apa yang pasti kami sentiasa bergelora, idealistik dan yakin, kemenangan pada suatu hari milik kami.
Di pertengahan jalan, saya tertewas, hilang pertimbangan, lalu menamatkan pengajian undang-undang saya di UKM. Beberapa ketika, saya pulang ke Alor Star, tetap setia bersama motosikal EX5. Buat menenangkan hati, sering saya berulang alik, sudah tentu bersama motosikal setia, ke pondok Dehrang mendengar kuliah Ustaz Nuruddin Al Banjari dan Ustaz Fahmi Zam Zam. Memperoleh ketenangan dan sokongan ibu bapa, permohonan memasuki kuliah undang-undang UiTM diajukan. Tahun 2002, ianya bermula kembali. Saya ke Shah Alam menjadi pelajar fakulti undang-undang walaupun minat untuk menjadi seorang peguam sudahpun padam.
Ketika masa “pemulihan” di Alor Star, oleh kerana kemaruk mendapatkan bahan bacaan, Berita Keadilan yang dipimpin Khalid Jaafar adalah antara bacaan wajib selain dari kitab-kitab fiqh dan Tafsir al Azhar. Minat itu saya teruskan ketika di Shah Alam. Ligat saya mengelilingi bandar tersebut mencari Berita Keadilan buat menghilangkan ketagihan. Tulisan dan wacana yang dicetus menggasak saya memikirkan kembali beberapa keyakinan serta sikap perjuangan. Saya mulai menaruh minat untuk mengenali Anwar Ibrahim. Tapi melalui apa? Makanya berbekalkan duit, sekitar RM30 dan motosikal itu, saya mencapai nashkah “Asian Renaissance,” karya versi Inggeris mantan timbalan perdana menteri, yang dihumban ke dalam penjara, di toko buku berdekatan. Dan buku itu menemani saya siang dan malam.
Secara tiba-tiba perasaan cemburu menyerang saya. Bibliografinya mengejek-ngejek saya. Senarai nama seperti Syed Naguib al Attas, Syed Hussein al Attas, Karl Popper, Tagore, T.S. Eliot, Sutan Takdir dan Dead European Males lainnya menerbitkan resah berpanjangan. Perpustakaan diserbu, mencari buku-buku yang ditulis oleh mereka semua dengan nafsu yang bergelojak. Kerap kali pemburuan berakhir dengan kekecewaan dan sumpah seranah. Misalnya “The Open Society and Its Enemies” karya Karl Popper, pemikir dari Vienna, langsung tidak terdapat di rak-rak buku perpustakaan. Bagi saya ianya adalah antara mehnah dan tribulasi yang paling besar pernah saya hadapi.
Perlahan-lahan gagasan Nahdah Asia Anwar Ibrahim menjelma. Meratib saya mengingati di antara pesan Gelombang Kebangkitan Asia (judul versi Melayu); “the cultivation of good taste takes the place of mediocrity and philistinism.” Mengunyah bab demi bab seperti Keunggulan Budaya, Ekonomi Manusiawi, Timur dan Barat serta Demokrasi dan Masyarakat Madani, merubah saya menjadi insan yang yakin. Kini saya menyendiri ber-”usrah” dengan membedah dan menghadam satu demi satu faham yang terkandung di dalam Gelombang Kebangkitan Asia. Ke “Melayu”-an dan Ke-“Islam”-an tidak menghalang saya dari menerobos tembok khusus intelektualisme yang selalu dikaitkan dengan golongan kelas menengah dan tinggi. Akar budaya dan juga agama menjadi jendela meneropong Islam dalam Sejarah dan Kebudayaan Melayu, Hamlet, John Keats, perdebatan seputar sekularisme, Ibsen dan FA Hayek.
Gelombang mempertemukan saya dengan sekelompok anak muda ataupun yang berhati muda. Dengan motosikal EX5 itulah saya berulang alik dari Shah Alam ke Telawi, meredah kedinginan malam dan kehangatan petang. Kami yang datang baik dari utara, timur dan selatan tanah air, membentuk komuniti kecil para seniman, penulis, wartawan dan pelajar. Akal, tradisi, kebebasan, moraliti, budaya, kuku besi dan agama menjadi tema perbincangan dan renungan. Usrah baru saya terdiri dari mereka yang fanatik berbahasa Melayu, sering menyeru agar menguasai, bukan sahaja bahasa Inggeris, bahkan bahasa Jerman, Mandarin, Pali dan Greek kuno serta menyanggah ketuanan perkauman yang meminggirkan etnik lainnya.
Rasa rendah diri disingkir jauh-jauh. Syarahan Karamah Insaniah, Pico della Mirandola bahawa “tiada yang lebih dikagumi selain manusia” bagaikan petir dan guruh yang berdentum di langit. Bingit dan mengejutkan. Gelombang memaksa sekaligus meyakinkan saya bahawa dikotomi di antara timur dan barat semakin kabur. Manakala Kebebasan dari regim yang tirani dan mengangkat martabat Budaya bangsa dari kelaihan berpanjangan merupakan tanggungjawab generasi perubahan; Generasi Gelombang Kebangkitan Asia.
Mulai saat itu saya mengenali, ataupun dengan lebih tepatnya, cuba mengenali sosok Anwar Ibrahim. Sudah tentu tidak sepenuhnya. Akan tetapi saya tidak perlu untuk bersekolah dengannya ataupun mengaku mengenali beliau selama berpuluh-puluh tahun. Cukup buat saya, menyedari serta memahami gagasan-gagasan beliau. Tidak perlu untuk membandingkan Anwar Ibrahim dengan tokoh-tokoh silam seperti Dr Burhanuddin al Helmy, Datuk Onn atau pun Alexander dari Macedonia itu!
Anwar adalah Anwar. Beliau melakar Gagasan Gelombang dan terbukti ampuh meroboh bongkah-bongkah Nilai-nilai Asia anutan beberapa pemimpin tua yang gusar legasi mereka akan lenyap dimamah keyakinan baru. Mentaliti pasca kolonialisme sudah tidak relevan. Sikap secara borongan membenci barat hanya menjadi alasan buat kebanyakan diktator memungkinkan kezaliman di tanah air sendiri. Manakala kita mengkritik pusat tahanan Guantanamo, pada ketika yang sama, negara ini juga memiliki pusat tahanan versinya sendiri di Kamunting.
Sekian lama kita berhadapan dengan politik hipokrasi. Dasar yang menguntungkan sebilangan kecil samada hanya untuk kepuasan elit pemerintah bumiputera ataupun tauke tauke kaya seharusnya ditolak tanpa ragu. Tidak ada justifikasi munasabah untuk kita menerima dalih membantu bangsa sedangkan hanya dua tiga kerat pimpinan barisan nasional sahaja yang kaya raya. Itulah manifestasi tertinggi politik perkauman sempit. Hakikatnya ianya cerita lama yang sudah basi.
Rakyat Malaysia terutamanya anak muda dari segenap lapisan masyarakat, merentasi sempadan agama dan etnik mempunyai kesedaran yang lebih baik dari apa yang disangkakan oleh sesetengah pihak. Pembentukan politik baru sesungguhnya tidak terelakkan. Acuan baru itu akan mengambil tempat, lalu bersaing dan mengalahkan politik lama yang bergantung kepada ketakutan, kecurigaan dan pemisahan antara kaum di negara ini. Kezaliman bukanlah hak milik mana-mana kaum, dan Keadilan adalah untuk semua.
Syaratnya ialah untuk terus beriltizam dengan Perubahan yang mengakar kepada hasrat untuk memelihara keluhuran perlembagaan, membanteras rasuah sehingga ke akar umbi, menjamin kedaulatan undang-undang, pengukuhan masyarakat demokratik dan berakhirnya politik perkauman.
Abad baru akan menjadi saksi, warisan pemerintah yang sekian lama “tahu apa yang terbaik untuk kita” sudah berakhir. Generasi Gelombang adalah kekuatan anak muda, suaranya, suara anak muda dan ianya arus deras yang mampu merubah lanskap politik serta sejarah negara ini. Anak muda mahukan sesuatu yang menyegarkan. Bahasa politik parokial perlu disisihkan. Perubahan yang luhur akan melibatkan semua untuk berbicara. Conversational Democracy adalah ciri penting penciptaan sebuah negara demokratik. Perdebatan dan wacana tidak menjurus kepada ungkapan seperti “pengkhianat bangsa” dan “agen yahudi.”
Generasi Gelombang tidak perlu menjadi apologetik dan mesti berani untuk mengaku bahawa bahasa demokrasi, kebebasan, keunggulan budaya dan pertumbuhan ekonomi yang mampan bukanlah monopoli mana-mana peradaban. Berbekalkan semangat baru, akan kita buktikan ungkapan Kipling bahawa, “There is too much in Asia and it is too old” adalah tidak benar sama sekali. Generasi Gelombang perlu merebut peluang mencipta dan menempa haluan baru buat negara ini.
Namun ini tidak bererti kita berhasrat mencipta yang baru dan terlepas dari pesan-pesan leluhur mahupun tradisi. Penggalian teks-teks klasik bagi saya menemukan kita dengan anjuran dasar untuk mengolah pandang dunia yang segar dan bertepatan dengan semangat zaman. Kebijaksanaan Bendahara Paduka Raja untuk menderhakai perintah Sultan misalnya, menyelamatkan Melaka dari hangus diberengus Jebat. Penulis Hikayat Hang Tuah menganyam cerita dan peri membiarkan pembacanya menilai di antara kesetiaan Hang Tuah, keterlanjuran Jebat, sikap tanpa usul periksa Sultan Melaka dan penderhakaan Bendahara Paduka Raja. Ternyata akhirnya penderhakaan Bendahara jualah yang menyelamatkan rakyat serta kerajaan.
Saya menyanggah beberapa telahan kononnya teks klasik ini menganjurkan taat setia tidak berbelah bahagi kepada pemerintah. Saya juga menolak untuk mengagung-agungkan perbuatan Jebat. Hikayat Hang Tuah adalah antara karya yang menampilkan kejelikan pemerintahan tanpa batasan. Ianya menjadi iktibar kepada kita untuk mencipta sebuah negara yang mempunyai batas-batas jelas untuk melindungi hak rakyat dari digasir pemimpinnya. Ini menguatkan hujah kita untuk menuntut sebuah negara dan masyarakat yang demokratik.
Kecurigaan di antara agama juga perlu dikikis. Islam tidak sewajarnya dipandang sebagai sebuah agama yang kuno, mandul daya intelektualismenya dan zalim semata-mata. Kegagalan penguasa dan sesetengah pemikir Melayu-Islam untuk mengangkat harakat agama adalah antara punca kecurigaan ini bertunas. Keilmuan Islam dan kekayaan tradisi kepustakaan Melayu dibiarkan usang kerana kebanyakan mereka lebih berminat untuk mengejar kerusi-kerusi empuk di institusi pengajian tinggi dan terpasung kerdil menjadi jiwa hamba. Manakala taraf keilmuan dan intelektualisme jauh merosot tatkala wacana-wacana falsafah, ekonomi dan agama yang rancak di luar negara langsung tidak dipedulikan. Kita masih menanti siapakah bakal mampu menandingi Syed Muhammad Naguib al Attas dan Syed Hussein al Attas.
Pilihanraya umum ke 12 menyaksikan Anwar Ibrahim dengan dokongan rakyat berbilang kaum dan agama, berjaya memimpin permuafakatan politik yang berjaya menafikan majoriti dua pertiga barisan nasional. Berbekalkan mesej Perubahan, permuafakatan tersebut berjaya menambat jiwa raga para pengundi. Perubahan secara mendadak menjadi komoditi hangat di pasaran. Saya rasa ini lah kali pertama dalam sejarah moden negara, rakyat Malaysia berada di kedudukan untuk menentukan “harga” dan “tawaran” siapa yang terbaik.
Inilah juga masanya buat kita, Generasi Gelombang menawarkan pakej yang terbaik untuk rakyat. Jelmakan keyakinan kita terhadap sebuah negara madani yang berpaksikan masyarakat demokratik, keluhuran perlembagaan, keunggulan budaya dan kemakmuran ekonomi. Jelaskan kepada rakyat mereka berhak kepada yang terbaik, makanya menjadi tanggungjawab kita untuk menjadi yang terbaik. Sudah tiba masanya kita menjayakan cita-cita “the cultivation of good taste take the place of mediocrity and philistinism.”
Eekmal Ahmad adalah kakitangan Pejabat Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim dan sering mendengar ulasan majalah Monocole, Wired dan Technological Review dari adik lelakinya.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
