Singapore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore) has been ranked third in the Global Financial Centres Index (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/65448464-8a9a-11dd-a76a-0000779fd18c.html) (GFCI), behind London and New York, according to a new report published by the City of London. In Asia, Singapore surged past Hong Kong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong) to move into third place overall, albeit by only one point.
Singapore gained 26 points in the index, more than any other top-20 centre, which allowed it to overtake Hong Kong. Hong Kong has been ranked fourth this time round. The GFCI is updated every six months in March and September. This report is the fourth edition.
London and New York still lead the field and ‘continue to be the only two truly global financial centres’, the report said. Both cities, hit by the credit crunch, shed points in this round of the GFCI. But London’s lead as the main banking centre in Europe is consolidated as Frankfurt and Paris have both declined in the ratings relative to other centres, the report noted.
Singapore’s 26-point gain also means that the gap between London and New York, and the third place centre fell to 73 points, from about 90 points in previous rankings. Singapore is just ahead of Hong Kong in the banking, insurance and government & regulatory sub-indices and is also ahead in the business environment sub-index. But Hong Kong continues to thrive, the report said.
The GFCI also noted that financial centres in the Middle East continue to generate a lot of interest. Dubai is identified most frequently by respondents as the centre likely to become significantly more important in the next few years; Singapore is second in this respect.
Dubai is also the centre mentioned most often when respondents are asked where their organisations are most likely to open offices in over the next few years.
The GFCI model rated 59 financial centres in this round. The study uses external instruments - such as the United Nation’s Human Development Index and the World Bank’s Ease of doing Business Index - as well as responses to an online questionnaire from 1,406 financial services professionals.
FAST forward to 2050 and review the last 100 years. The century began simply enough.
The Americans and their allies won WWII and immediately set about dominating the global economy with a free market that produced consumer goods such as motor vehicles for a rising middle class. The only credible competitor to the West was the USSR, but this system collapsed in 1989, allowing former Soviet states to embrace free market economies.
The undisputed headquarters of global capitalism during the late 20th century was Wall Street; it accommodated institutions that had the capacity to raise vast amounts of capital. But the primacy of New York at the world's financial centre was challenged by London around the turn of the 21st century following two distinct developments.
The new free states of Eastern Europe as well as rising sovereign states in the Middle East orientated to London for capital raising purposes. Russian billionaires and Arab sheiks embraced London's Belgravia more readily than Manhattan's Upper East Side. Then, of course, there was 9/11, which made London seem safer than New York.
Almost two decades after the collapse of the Soviet's socialist republic came the collapse the financial system that underpinned the free market. The resultant state bailout of financial institutions propelled free market economies towards a more restrained version of capitalism. And there you had the beginnings of the Great Convergence: the Soviets (and the Chinese) turned to capitalism in the 1990s; the Americans effectively nationalised their financial system a decade later.
Whereas in the 20th century capitalism's HQ was Wall Street, this role was shared with London after 2001. A decade later it was almost as if the finance-raising capability of New York and London City had been atomised. New centres of world finance emerged simultaneously to buttress the old in cities far removed from the Atlantic nexus, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai.
Even Sydney benefited from what eventually would be known as the regionalisation of the global economy - it was regarded as a pleasant enough place from which to manage Asian affairs. Indeed, there was a preference by some global institutions to base their regional offices in lifestyle cities within reasonable proximity, or at least within the same time zone, of the moneymaking coalface. This is much the same principle that permitted Russian billionaires to live in London but to derive their income from Russia.
The global moneymaking coalface in the early decades of the 21st century remained what would be known as the "middle-class-isation" of China, India and much of Eastern European.
But this coalface also included the reorientation of the oil-based economies of Middle Eastern states as well as the reconstruction of Iraq following the withdrawal of combat troops in 2015. By 2025, Iraqi and Afghan migrants had formed enclaves in Sydney's southwest and Melbourne's north, which was not unlike the Vietnamese embrace of Cabramatta and Abbotsford a decade after the end of the Vietnam War.
It took some time for Australian - and global - business to appreciate the new economic alignment. The US and Western Europe were still important - perhaps the most important - markets. But for the first time in 500 years, a critical mass of other centres of commercial influence emerged in Asia, India, the Middle East and across Russia. The transition manifested itself in both blunt and subtle ways. The largest buildings, companies and capital reserves shifted from New York to Hong Kong and Dubai. By the middle of the 2020s, popular culture television programs were set in a chic English-speaking enclave of Shanghai.
At about the same time, most Westerners learnt how to say "hello" in Chinese: ni hao. Australians could even cite the most glamorous residential precinct in Singapore. And in Dubai one "Australian suburb" was known as the Earls Court of the Middle East.
But I think the piece de resistance of the new economic order came in 2020 when Qantas began a direct air service between Sydney and Moscow.
But there were more subtle effects of what would become known as the advent of the post-Atlantic world. Australians infiltrated the global community to a greater degree than ever before. Gone, too, by the middle of the century, was Australia's notorious cultural cringe. No longer were Australians chronically aware of their isolation from the centre of global economic and cultural power. And the reason is not that some whiz-bang new technology enabled Australians to travel to Europe and North America in four hours. The reason is that after the 2008 financial meltdown, the centre of world economic activity migrated closer to Australia.
Astute players in the Australian property industry read the changing landscape and positioned their businesses in Asia's ascendant cities. Some - in fact many - had developed links with Dubai. This was especially the case with property consultants from the late 1990s onwards. But the real prize came with the recovery in 2010, when new financial services businesses burgeoned and demanded office and hotel accommodation. Part of this momentum applied to Hong Kong and Shanghai, but for many Western companies these cities carried sovereign risk. The city that boomed most as a consequence of the meltdown was Singapore. It offered cultural links with Britain and the US. It offered connections and proximity to China, India and Japan. The business community spoke English. And, best of all, Singapore had strong cultural and business links with Australia.
In view of this "future history", it might be a good idea to stay a night in Singapore on your way to London.
It's a small super-densely-populated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density) humid island with lots of short old (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate) people who've never done drugs before (zero tolerance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_tolerance)). A few kilos of pot set on fire would cause a million people to spend the next few days eating potato chips and watching Gilligan's Island... :lol:
That's a big question here in Asia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Asia) at the moment, not only because the city recently announced a dismal negative 7.8 percent GDP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product) growth thanks to the financial crisis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_recession), but also because its days as Asia's financial capital may be numbered. There has been all sorts of speculation since the credit crisis began about which financial centers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Centre) -- NYC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City), London (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London), Frankfurt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_am_Main), Singapore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore), Tokyo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo), etc -- might drop down in the rankings post recession. What's ironic is that while Hong Kong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong) was mostly insulated from the banking debacle because its institutions were not as exposed to credit default swaps and all those other funky instruments, it may be amongst the most vulnerable now.
That's not because of the crisis, but because Chinese officials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China) announced firmly a few weeks back that they would like to see Shanghai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai) become China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_China)'s financial center. That's potentially very bad news for Hong Kong, which is almost entirely economically dependant on financial services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_services), and its role as a gateway for investors into China. Some 60 percent of the market capitalization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_capitalization) of the Hong Kong stock exchange and over 70 percent of its daily trading comes off the back of Chinese mainland firms. Most of these are large state run enterprises (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-owned_corporation#People.27s_Republic_of_China) - the sort that leaders in Beijing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing) could very easily order to re-list in Shanghai.
Hong Kong has adapted before - after all, it went from selling plastic flowers 50 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hong_kong#The_1950s), to higher level manufacturing (eventually outsourced to the mainland when China opened up), to being a global financial capital. And, as a press official from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Stock_Exchange) told me today, "The fact that Hong Kong has a fully convertible currency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convertibility) (while Shanghai does not (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Value_of_the_renminbi)), as well as rule of law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Hong_Kong) (also dubious on the mainland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_China)) remains a big advantage." This is true. But with at least some of its old business (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hongs#Post-handover) likely to move to Shanghai and Beijing, the city needs to move beyond trading. Some American business-men I've spoken to in recent days see a future for Hong Kong as a provider of consulting services to Chinese businesses – helping less sophisticated enterprises from the mainland figure out how to brand themselves and sell themselves to an international audience as they expand abroad. Others say it will become Asia's MBA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Business_Administration) hub.
Either way, it will need to deal with some of the governance problems and issues of vested interests that have plagued it in recent years (critics say Asian tycoons cut unfair deals here, and the city has yet to deal properly with its recent bond scandal). Hong Kong needs to at least keep up the perception that it’s a fairer, better-governed financial capital than Shanghai. Otherwise, as former Chinese premier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_of_the_State_Council_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China) Zhu Rongji (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_Rongji) predicted a few years back, it may become Toronto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto) to Shanghai's New York.
From a speech by Lee Hsien Loong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hsien_Loong), prime minister of Singapore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Singapore), on the potential repeal of section 377a (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377A_of_the_Penal_Code_(Singapore)) from Singapore's penal code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Code_%28Singapore%29):[youtube=425,350]DiNnJzcJJ9E[/youtube]
[youtube=425,350]zC8KYm8B0z4[/youtube]
[youtube=425,350]H5xpndva3JY[/youtube]
Mr. Lee, in this speech, is defending his government (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore)'s position to retain section 377a, which criminalizes, among other things, sodomy in the Republic of Singapore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Singapore). (Stay with me.) Loong explains that his government will not actively enforce the provision, but that it will be maintained, symbolically, as a measure of the fact that Singaporean society is broadly conservative.
What is remarkable about this speech is not the specific position laid out by the government, but the way in which it is laid out. Lee feels it necessary to give a detailed, well-thought-out, 30 minute speech to Parliament (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Singapore) on the reasoning behind this decision, to the point that even if you were to disagree with Lee and his party, you would at least respect the fact that they gave the issue serious consideration. He's talking to his citizens as though they were adults, not children, and as though they were customers, who could leave Singapore with relative ease if they were dissatisfied.
This is more remarkable when you consider that Singapore is a broadly authoritarian society (http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/related_material/singapore.pdf). Lee, and his father Lee Kuan Yew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew), have held power in Singapore continuously since its separation from Malaysia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_Singapore#Independence_of_Singapore) in 1965. With this sort of dynastic power structure, one would hardly expect the government to be this responsive to its citizens. But it is. Why?
In a word: exit. Singapore's political structure is based heavily on the immigration of skilled citizens (http://app.www.sg/what/53/Singapore-Citizenship.aspx), because the birth rate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate) in Singapore is well below replacement - only 1.29 children per woman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate) of childbearing age. Not only do they have to attract new citizens to ensure the health of their polity, they have to ensure that their existing citizens don't leave. And given that most of their citizens are wealthy immigrants, and that Singapore is a relatively small country, the relative ease of leaving Singapore has a way of focusing their leaders to work hard on providing what can be considered good customer service.
But, you might say, Singapore has these draconian restrictions on drug use and consensual sexual behavior - if that is the future of competitive government, then that's not a future I want to be a part of. The key here is to remember that if we Let A Thousand Nations Bloom, some of those nations will probably be socially conservative, and while Singaporean society might be illiberal, it is still a liberal goal to ensure that people can live in a society that meshes with their values. A political world based on exit, and not voice, will have plenty of societies that any given individual would find unsuitable. But just as you don't have to buy every product you see at the supermarket, you don't have to live in every single polity. You just need to find the one that fits.
Leave it to Singapore to make the funniest YouTube video evah!
[youtube=425,350]nMh04ouS5Es[/youtube]
(http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/smiley-laughing001.gif) (http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys.php)
(If you understand all the references, you'd will be laughing so hard you'll need an oxygen tank.)
The people *I'd* be going to Thailand with, if I ever did, WOULD be going just for the ladyboys :twisted:
Hong Kong remains the world's freest place to do business while the United States has lost its claim to an unrestricted economy, according to an annual report published Wednesday.
Hong Kong, a former British colony which was returned to China in 1997, edged out rival Singapore to claim top spot for the sixteenth consecutive year in the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom (http://www.heritage.org/index/Ranking.aspx).
Australia and New Zealand grabbed third and fourth spot respectively.
The report is compiled by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, and The Wall Street Journal.
Ireland, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Denmark and Chile rounded out the top ten list, which is based on criteria including economic openness, trade, the efficiency of domestic regulators, and the rule of law.
But Canada pushed the US from the top seven economies deemed to have an entirely free economy due to "notable decreases in financial freedom, monetary freedom, and property rights," the report said.
"The US government's interventionist responses to the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 have significantly undermined economic freedom and long-term prospects for economic growth," the report said.
Mainland China was ranked 140 in the list of 183 countries with Cuba, Zimbabwe and North Korea rounding out the bottom of the list.
Christopher Sun of Hong Kong is directing a new porn movie that will actually be in 3-D. The movie is being called 3-D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy and will be the first 3-D IMAX porn movie (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67F0T620100816).
From the article: "First out of the gates, the soft porn Hong Kong film comes as the stricken industry, hit hard by free Internet porn in recent years, turns to 3-D as a potential money-spinner, following on from the success of Hollywood blockbusters such as James Cameron's Avatar."
Singapore also has much more draconian law than Hong Kong does, for everything. |
The word "draconian" would apply if it's a government in the traditional coercive sense, but not if Singapore is like an overgrown voluntary neighborhood association / charter city that anyone is free to leave at any time. They're "strict", yes, but some would argue they won't be as economically competitive without those laws.
(EDIT: added a quote box with the message ID in case it gets deleted and Someone blames me for "necroing"...)
Good, I hope this means you won't mind being caned if you're caught smoking in an elevator.
And yes, I do have a cane I could use...