Insider's trading

Insider's trading

Here are two economic articles of Pakatan spinning , lying , bluffing and pulling wool over one's eyes from rocky's bru .

Read it and decide for yourself . No wonder we are losing FDIs to other countries .

Sime Darby's RM1 B tab, Malaysian Insider's blunder and Pakatan Rakyat's blooper. An early morning Malaysian Insider report that Sime Darby would suffer its biggest-ever loss (of RM 2.5 billion) has punched a RM1 billion hole in Sime's market capitalisation, as outraged Pakatan politicians blindly bayed for blood (read here).

The MI report would have a good April fool pun, but April's long gone. Sime Darby's infamous 'on the ball' board fiddled while shareholders were being burned throughout the day. Sime could have sought a suspension from the market regulator but, instead, it stood still and watched the carnage.

Sime Darby did, eventually and after the market had closed, issue a statement that it would be posting a profit and NOT a loss as reported by the MI. But by then these bloopers had caused RM1 billion of Sime's capitalisation to be wiped out in just one day. It also allowed some very rich people, who scooped up the shares on the cheap yesterday, to become richer.

FDI: When big is not always better

"A STIR of sorts has been caused by the story that foreign direct investment (FDI) into the country for 2009 fell 81% to US$1.4bil from US$7.3bil. But really it should not. If we want higher value-added, then labour-intensive industries are not our target. This is the area which many foreign investors like because they can get tremendous cost savings by using cheap labour in places like China, Vietnam etc.If greater value-added is what we are after athen increasingly more investments have to be made in the services area – think tourism or education for instance. That does not necessarily need foreign investment – we can use local money ...." 10 ways of doing without FDI by P. Gunasegaran, The Star, 1 Aug 10

Before you decide to migrate to Vietnam, the Philippines or Indonesia because they have bigger FDIs than us, please read Guna's piece.

It's an easy-to-understand article as to why we should not be too excited about their bigger size. Tony Pua would have been spot on if this had happened 10 years ago. But we have passed that early stage of development, believe it or not. We are not in the same class as Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Low value-added and labour-intensive investments go to them. We've said we wanted the high-value added, high-wage, and hi-tech investments.