Fabulous start, no cover-up, another bubble bursts

Dear Kam,
I don’t know about you, but I’m excited because it’s a new decade full of exciting possibilities. The last decade was called the Noughties. Can we call this one the Tweens?
Creative Dictionary
via email

It’s a new year and a new decade and already fabulous things are happening. There is lots of trouble brewing over a court decision to allow a Catholic newspaper to use a particular word, which from my research on the interwebs I have discovered is used by all Arabic people (Muslim, Christian and, gulp, Jewish). And yet there is confusion.

But wait, there is good news. One of the LRT lines has finally been upgraded and it now has four carriages instead of two. After my research on the interwebs, I can tell you that this is technically called “double capacity” (or, “what it should have been in the first place”). Somebody from the relevant institution said it’s their “New Year gift to the public”. He did not specify which new year, but the LRT has already been around for 10 years, so we must assume he means the year 2000. But, it’s a “gift” and we must be grateful. Maybe regular LRT users have been misbehaving and they didn’t deserve the “gift” earlier.

So the new decade has started with some confusion, a gift and lots of gratitude. It’s a Brand New Decade!

Dear Kam,
Usually, I forget everything that happened more than 10 minutes previously, but I can’t help thinking that some jet engines were stolen. What’s happened with that? I’m sorry, I forgot what I just asked.
Amnesia Lim
via email

It is incredible that two air-force jet engines could be stolen. How could big things like jet engines disappear and then leave the country? This is a remarkable country. Fortunately, like any good citizen, I have complete trust in the institutions of this nation, so when promises are made that there will be no cover-up, I know that my duty is to wait for the no-cover-up, which is always exciting.

Initial reports suggested that a whole bunch of air-force personnel had been sacked, but subsequent reports said that issue was completely unrelated. So the wait for the real no-cover-up had to wait for the new year. Now some people have been charged. An air-force sergeant and a company director. Two people. Two great big engines. Er, OK.

Dear Guru,
When the global economy crashed last year, I cashed out my investments and stuffed all the money into my mattress. But now my mattress is getting lumpy and difficult to sleep on, so I think I might invest in something. Can you suggest anything?
$$$$$
via email

Just when you thought it was safe to get involved in the global economy, another bubble bursts. The incredible Dubai property bonanza has evaporated. People tend to get very excited about making lots of money, so they allow themselves to believe in stuff that has no basis in reality. The dotcom bubble and the subprime thing being among the most recent. I have actually made the effort to try to understand how the subprime mortgage thing nearly sent us back into the Stone Age. I’ve watched several documentaries (including some excellent ones on the PBS website) and I’ve read countless articles. After hours of research, I can now explain what happened.

Apparently, venerable Wall Street institutions and banks believed that they could make billions if they put blank pieces of paper into a box and then cut off a chicken’s head. It was also possible to make lots of money if you sent USD100,000 to the son of a deposed African dictator, especially if his email was written in CAPITAL LETTERS and had lots of exclamation marks!!! They also believed, and this is really ridiculous, that US property prices would rise annually by at least 8% forever. Forever! Even I could sense a bubble forming. Even Alan Greenspan has said that he didn’t understand how the subprime mortgage thing worked, although he somehow forgot to mention this when he was the head of the US Federal Reserve.

And now the Dubai bubble has burst. Ironically, it burst just before Dubai opened the world’s tallest building, just as the Chrysler Building was opened the same week as the Wall Street crash of 1929. At least when the subprime bubble burst, there was a good chance that the global economy would eventually come back to life, as it did after the Great Depression. But it’s hard to see how Dubai will ever come back. What does it actually do? What does it have, except for lots of empty office space and no oil? I remember watching very dull Discovery Channel documentaries about the building of big, palm shaped housing developments in Dubai and wondering who on earth would want to live there. Sea levels are rising, and it’s really ugly. Will Dubai ever return, or will it become a ghost town?

Stock markets are now steadily rising and New York’s Dow Jones is back over 10,000 (it has been a very long time since I bothered to check the KLSE). But I get worried when the stock markets go up like this, because it’s probably more wishful thinking than reality. Whenever stock prices crash, the markets will instantly shut down, because people don’t want to lose all their money. Why not shut down the markets when prices suddenly go up as well? It might save us all a lot of trouble.


Malaysian guru Kam Raslan imparts his wisdom to readers every week.

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This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 788, Jan 11 – 17, 2010