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It is easy to be an economist today. The vocabulary of the trade is limited to only two words, recession and recovery. Apparently there is nothing between. It must be one or the other. The national economy is recovering, or it is headed for a recession, or perhaps already in one, or maybe just balancing along the strung wire of quarterly statistics, leaning now left toward recovery, now tilting awkwardly toward recession.
In the larger sense, the decks of the economy should not take their angle from the routine plunge into the oncoming waves of fortune, but should ride with the greater currents, rising and falling with lunar forces, trade winds and the tides. Navigation is still a skilled art, and the captain should have a keen eye for the clouds and winds which give portent of bad weather to come. An early warning gives time for preparation, and if the seamanship has been faulty, there is more time and sea room for working away from the lee shore.
The captain must be courageous in admitting prior errors, as his stubborness endangers the entire vessel and crew. Ego in a sea captain is a dangerous trait. Even more dangerous is the tendency to clap into irons any who question his eye or will. There is no trace of those who have been fed to the sharks.
In economics, position determination often depends on which visionary is giving the analysis and projection. Those who make surveys of producer and consumer sentiment have an enviable record of accurately prognosticating future economic behaviour, shadowing the showmanship of politicians swaying and swerving onstage to the tune of optimistic denial. On-site interviews are most helpful, providing instantaneous information of business conditions.
In Malaysia there is only one captain, the prime minister, who directs the national resources according to his whim. He had an aide, now side-lined, who assisted with the day-to-day affairs of the finance department. But now the books, such as they are, for both the country and the party, have been handed over without audit, and the checkbook is now in the hands of the party president/prime minister. There has been no audit of the national treasury nor of the political party's affairs.
The prime minister has a checkered history as a financier, earning the flavour of a high stakes, high risk venture capitalist/gambler. His winnings are small, his losses monumental. He has taken flyers in everything from currency trading to steel mills. His hobbies extend from airplanes to cars and ships, with airports to land, highways to drive, and ports to dock. He puts the national resources into empty skyscraper buildings, gaudy parliament houses, and needless dams without a care for expense or means to pay.
If the prime minister is not a loser, there has never been one. The sums he has spent on political patronage and unrealistic mega-projects, added to the losses on risky ventures, astound even the most imaginative. For his losses he has every imaginable excuse, from greedy currency traders (whose only sin is they took the other side of his bet) to the lazy and stupid Malays, countrymen and party members. He doesn't seem to admire them, and the feelings are reciprocal. The rest of the population are either family, cronies, communists, or cult-oriented terrorists out to depose him.
This is the maniac at the helm, denying that shoals lie ahead. He draws more money from the national chest, casting it into the surrounding seas, as though it were wave-calming oil, proclaiming to the crew that this is the best means to save the ship. He has steadfastly maintained that the ship of state is well-founded,and can weather any storm, independent of inclement conditions besetting neighboring vessels. He will admit neither failure nor loss, denying that it is his profligate gambling that has put the ship in danger.
He has prepared none to replace him, anxious about training a competitor. As a result, the ship has no new leadership, and must depend on the solitary old seaman, who brings a history of sunken ships, and has only the failed techniques of his past to depend on today, when the oncoming waves are gigantic. This is an untried hand, overweeningly proud, supercilious in his arrogance, who now demands obeisance as he directs the frightened crew.
But this time the stakes are enormous. The colours of the sky give warning. What was said to be a squall has all the makings of a full blown typhoon. The weather warnings say the lull was but an opportunity lost, the eye of a storm whose further edge looms as the mother of storms.
What is not recognised is the danger of the calm, when the wind does not blow, and there is no motion. Such is to be the fate of the vessel, slowly losing steerage way as the winds fall. Let the captain flail and wail, left him curse the day,and bemoan the fates, the wind will not blow. The albatross will not fall from his neck.
He seems somehow to know, and has sent away his family and friends in the ship's lifeboats, larded to the gunwales with the ship's stores. There he stands on the decks amid the wreckage, a madman steering the once-proud ship into the shoals, all flags waving, directing his nominees to buy all the vessel's shares with the crew's portion.
For most of the crew it will be back to the kampung, but what of the head-strong old captain? He has declared an intent to stay to the end. It will be a lonely one, in his turreted cabin, with the door guarded by a brace of muscle-headed eunuchs.
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