Malaysia Economic News

[Big Toe]

It is true that as cost gets higher in SG, more high level staff/bosses set up operations in Msia, usually within close proximity to sg. It is not a new trend, it has been happening all the while. All companies big and small. Small printing firms, also larger listed firm like venture. It is not unique to SG/Msia, it happens also Taiwan/China, HK and shenzhen, etc etc

[opmi]

It is true that as cost gets higher in SG, more high level staff/bosses set up operations in Msia, usually within close proximity to sg. It is not a new trend, it has been happening all the while. All companies big and small. Small printing firms, also larger listed firm like venture. It is not unique to SG/Msia, it happens also Taiwan/China, HK and shenzhen, etc etc

stable govt policies - is what JB dont have. The car registration policy is one. Dont know if they want to track or want to see how to extract more money out of Singaporeans.
No companies would want to invest long term in a flip flop govt.

HK and Shenzhen is bad comparison. SZ has a pool of 1bn to choose from. The good ones in Msia already run to SG or OZ already.

[Big Toe]

It is true that many brighter Msians are working abroad as Msia offers limited opportunities.

As for the Singapore companies invested in Msia now, well, they did not have have much of a choice.
It's more of a forced decision rather than a choice. The choice is to close down or to head north where it is still possible to sustain operations which is lower margin and is labor/land intensive. Especially true for companies involved in manufacturing.

But what about the higher value add manufacturing? Put it this way, even premium medical equipment is slowly being shifted to china for assembly/manufacturing. The $1M bentley car you are driving maybe assembled in Europe, from sub assemblies manufactured in china.

[Behappyalways]

malaysia-turns-to-ringgit-peg-architect
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/201...-architect

[CityFarmer]

This is a real danger, that a split similar as Yellow/Red in Thailand. If it is messed with religious and races differences, than it might become what's happening in South Thailand...

Johorean are one of the key supporters, which means Singapore isn't too far from the mess...

Malaysians split over Bersih rally, survey finds

(Aug 28): Malaysians are split in their opinions of tomorrow's Bersih 4 rally, a recent survey by independent pollster Merdeka Centre has found, with 43% viewing it favourably as opposed to 47% who do not support the assembly.

The survey found that while 48% of the men surveyed were in support of Bersih 4, only 39% of women had the same opinion. Fifty-one percent of urban voters viewed the rally favourably but among the rural folk, only 31% supported it.

Similarly, 57% of those from households earning more than RM3,000 a month were supportive of Bersih and only 28% of those who come from households earning less than RM3,000 were in favour of the rally.

But the disparity between those who were in support of Bersih 4 was more evident in the race category, where it was found that Chinese supporters of Bersih made up more than three times the percentage of Malays who were in favour of the rally.

"Perhaps the most marked finding was that the rally was supported by 81% of the ethnic Chinese respondents and 51% of the ethnic Indian respondents but only favoured by 23% of the ethnic Malay voters interviewed," Merdeka Center said in a statement today.

The 1,010 people surveyed were randomly selected from Peninsular Malaysia along the lines of ethnicity, gender, age and parliament constituencies and were interviewed between August 15 and August 21.
...
http://www.theedgemarkets.com/sg/node/225667

[greengiraffe]

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/13/investiga...lobal.html

Investigations Stymied in Malaysia, Critics of Najib Razak Take Their Case Global
Thomas Fuller
14 Hours AgoThe New York Times

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COMMENTJoin the Discussion
[Image: 102991678-GettyImages-479295738.530x298....1442129260]Manan Vatsyayana | AFP | Getty Images
The 1MDB logo is seen on a billboard at the funds flagship Tun Razak Exchange under-development site in Kuala Lumpur on July 3, 2015.
PENANG, Malaysia — Since reports first surfaced alleging that hundreds of millions of dollars had been transferred into the personal accounts of the Malaysian prime minister, investigations into the scandal have met stiff government resistance.
Now they are on life support.
Investigators have been sidelined, the publications of a crusading news organization have been suspended, and a deputy prime minister who asked too many questions was fired.
Faced with what they see as stonewalling at home, opponents of Prime Minister Najib Razak, some from within his own party, are going global, prodding foreign governments and agencies to investigate allegations of graft and money laundering they say are related to the case.
Some international inquiries have already begun.
The Swiss authorities have opened an investigation into assets linked to a sovereign wealth fund that Mr. Najib leads. The Hong Kong police say they are looking into deposits made at a branch of a Swiss bank there. And a state investment fund in the United Arab Emirates is reportedly seeking clarification over a debt payment of more than a billion dollars that was promised by the sovereign wealth fund but may not have been delivered.
Read More[url=http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/28/1mdb-sparks-political-crisis-protests-in-malaysia.html]1MDB sparks political crisis, protests in Malaysia
John Pang, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, says moves by foreign law enforcement agencies could create pressure for more robust Malaysian investigations, which he describes as verging on moribund.
"I don't think that anyone thinks international efforts will unseat Najib alone," Mr. Pang said. "The hope is that they will embolden, support or fortify the investigative efforts at home."
Toward that end, a relatively junior member of Mr. Najib's party, Khairuddin Abu Hassan, has been touring the globe, dropping off documents at the offices of law enforcement agencies.
"This is the biggest financial scandal we've ever had in our country," Mr. Khairuddin said in an interview in Penang last week. "But those who are involved in the investigation of this case are being arrested and questioned by the police."
Mr. Khairuddin seems to have the backing of influential politicians and disgruntled officials.
More from the New York Times: 
Switzerland Investigates Fund Executives in Malaysian Scandal
Antigovernment Protesters Gather in Malaysia, Defying Police Orders
Millions in Premier's Accounts Didn't Come From State Fund, Malaysian Antigraft Body Says
In what he calls a "road show" for justice, he has traveled to Switzerland, Britain, France, Hong Kong and Singapore over the past three months to deliver packets of information related to the sovereign wealth fund at the center of the scandal. The fund, called 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB, is chaired by Mr. Najib.
Mr. Najib's critics say the fund has lost large sums of money and taken on expensive debt. The government has struggled to explain the spaghetti-like complexity of its financial transactions across the globe, including funds held in offshore tax havens. The most explosive revelation was the nearly $700 million transferred to Mr. Najib in 2013 from entities reported to be linked to 1MDB.
Mr. Najib has denied wrongdoing, saying he had "never taken funds for personal gain," but has not specifically explained where the money came from.
Mr. Khairuddin declined to specify who is assisting him in his investigative efforts, but many in Malaysia suspect that he is being fed tips and documents by a range of people unhappy with Mr. Najib, including Mahathir Mohamad, a former Malaysian prime minister waging a campaign to unseat Mr. Najib.
In his road show, Mr. Khairuddin is sometimes accompanied by his lawyer, Matthias Chang, a former senior adviser to Mr. Mahathir. Mr. Chang traveled to Bern, the Swiss capital, with Mr. Khairuddin in August, and they dropped off documents pertaining to money laundering at the attorney general's office there, the two men said.
Read MoreWhy investors are snubbing Malaysian 'bargains'
The Swiss investigation, which was underway before the pair visited, is moving forward.
Last week, the Swiss authorities said they had frozen tens of millions of dollars in Swiss accounts related to the case. They are seeking the cooperation of the Malaysian authorities, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's office said.
In Hong Kong, Mr. Khairuddin filed a police report accompanied by a photograph of a document that he says contains Mr. Najib's handwritten notations indicating that 1.125 billion Malaysian ringgit, about $260 million, was transferred into Credit Suisse accounts in the city. The documents list four companies as the beneficiaries of the accounts, but Mr. Khairuddin said Mr. Najib had signatory powers over them. He said the photo came from an "insider" in Mr. Najib's circle who is now disenchanted.
The Malaysian government called the accusations "baseless and politically motivated lies."
"The Prime Minister does not control any Credit Suisse bank accounts in Hong Kong, whether in his name or the name of the companies mentioned," the government said in a statement emailed to The New York Times. "This latest bid to smear and criminalize the prime minister via Dr. Mahathir's discredited henchman Khairuddin Abu Hassan is the most desperate yet," the statement said. "It will fail, because the allegations are false."
Credit Suisse declined to comment on the matter. The Hong Kong police said an investigation was underway and confirmed they had received information about "some bank deposits."
In Malaysia, the central bank and the anticorruption commission are still officially investigating, but the case has been stymied by transfers of vital officials and an aggressive police investigation into leaks to the news media. Last month, the police raided the offices of the anticorruption commission, ostensibly to investigate a leak.
In a purge that stunned the nation in late July, Mr. Najib removed the attorney general and fired several cabinet ministers, including the deputy prime minister, who had publicly raised questions about the issue. A parliamentary committee investigating the fund was gutted when Mr. Najib promoted vital members to more senior posts in the government.
In August, the government disbanded a task force investigating 1MDB. And the deputy head of the powerful Special Branch of the police was removed from his post, a move he attributed to his insistence that the investigation into the sovereign wealth fund be "conducted transparently."
The Malaysian authorities have also frozen the accounts of Mr. Khairuddin using a law that seeks to prevent money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The notice served to Mr. Khairuddin did not elaborate on the allegations against him.
Mr. Najib's government also has a high degree of control over the police, the bureaucracy and the news media.
In July, the government suspended the license of The Edge Financial Daily and The Edge Financial Weekly, sister publications that were taking a leading role in investigating the scandal.
One of the leading sources of leaks and information on the scandal has been The Sarawak Report, a website based in Britain beyond the government's reach. The government sought an international arrest warrant for the website's founder, Clare Rewcastle-Brown, but Interpol, the international police agency, rejected the request. In July, the government blocked access to The Sarawak Report in Malaysia, but bulletins are widely circulated over social media.
It was The Sarawak Report, along with The Wall Street Journal, that first reported the transfer of nearly $700 million into what were believed to be Mr. Najib's accounts.
The government's anticorruption commission, in its investigation, confirmed that the money had gone into Mr. Najib's accounts, but said that it had come from an unidentified donor in the Middle East, not 1MDB.
Mr. Pang, the expert in Malaysian politics, says the international investigations are warranted.
"Massive sums of Malaysian public money have been moved around the world and hundreds of millions have gone inexplicably into the private accounts of individuals," he said. "It says something about the state of global financial oversight that no red flags were raised, or that if they were, nothing has been done about it until now."
--Michael Forsythe contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

[greengiraffe]

Economic woes weigh on Najib

Published
2 hours ago

Shannon Teoh Malaysia Correspondent In Kuala Lumpur
The ebbing confidence in Malaysia's economy, with the ringgit sliding to 18-year lows against the United States dollar, has forced Prime Minister Najib Razak to take emergency measures.
The embattled Malaysian leader will announce these steps today, just weeks after forming a "Special Economic Committee" that includes his brother and CIMB chief Nazir Razak, as well as Tan Sri Nor Mohamed Yakcop, famed for the currency peg and capital controls that were put in place following the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
But the Najib administration has vowed not to return to those measures. It insists economic fundamentals are solid but external forces are being felt more deeply because the the market is more liberalised than before.

The ringgit - Asia's worst-performing currency this year - traded at over 4.3 to the greenback all of last week and ended last Friday at 3.05 to the Singdollar, with analysts expecting it to slip further.
The net outflow of foreign funds from Malaysian equities for the first eight months of the year stood at RM16 billion (S$5.3 billion), more than twice the RM6.9 billion for the whole of last year. Malaysia's central bank last Friday kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 3.25 per cent, as was widely expected with the ringgit continuing to slide and the global economic outlook remaining uncertain.
Datuk Seri Najib has often sold his leadership on sound economic growth and desperately needs a turnaround amid growing political uncertainty.
The controversy surrounding political funding and continued doubts over state investor 1Malaysia Development Berhad's RM42 billion debt pile have resulted in growing calls for him to step down, even from within the ruling party. He has so far weathered the storm largely by using his executive power to eliminate threats from within the government. But an increasingly bearish market may force his colleagues and allies to turn against him instead of having to explain a tanking economy to voters.

[CityFarmer]

The daily average trading value of KLCI is around RM1.9 billion (based on AR 2013). The RM20 billion injection, should be significant enough, to create an impact...

Malaysian PM Najib announces $6.6 billion boost for stock market

KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 14): The Malaysian government will inject RM20 billion ($6.6 billion) into a state equity investment firm to shore up the stock market, Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Monday, in a bid to boost confidence in a country reeling from a political scandal.

Datuk Seri Najib told a news conference that the equity investment firm, ValueCap, will invest in undervalued Malaysian companies.
...
http://www.theedgemarkets.com/sg/article...ock-market

[opmi]

KLCI need rescue meh? Maybe EPF with its huge holdings of Bursa stocks.

EPF goes down > People savings > Msia goes down

[weijian]

The daily average trading value of KLCI is around RM1.9 billion (based on AR 2013). The RM20 billion injection, should be significant enough, to create an impact...

Malaysian PM Najib announces $6.6 billion boost for stock market

KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 14): The Malaysian government will inject RM20 billion ($6.6 billion) into a state equity investment firm to shore up the stock market, Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Monday, in a bid to boost confidence in a country reeling from a political scandal.

Datuk Seri Najib told a news conference that the equity investment firm, ValueCap, will invest in undervalued Malaysian companies.
...
http://www.theedgemarkets.com/sg/article...ock-market

Did a quick readup on ValueCap. It is wholly owned by Khazanah Nasional (Msian SWF), KWAP (pension retirement fund) and PNB and its previous mandate was to manage 3rd party funds by attracting mainly shariah funds. It is purely a fund manager.

Sceptics/critics are going to have the usual suspects - (1) Is this going to smoothen the path for 1MDB's proposed IPO (part of najib's rationalization plan)? (2) So who is going to provide the 20bil rm of funds?