.

The most frustrating psychological realities of the financial world is "hindsight bias". This is the  "I knew-it-all-along" phenomenon. Everyone look like a genius after the charts have already climbed or dived. When looking backward, market movements look like a predictable sequence of logical events. In reality, the future is always a messy cloud of probabilities. There are four types of "post-fact expertise": - The retrospective predictors: They knew the stock was going to crash, or soar. Did they hold a short or long position pre-fact? - The opportunity capitalisers: They leverage market events to build a brand/sell subscriptions. - The emotionally charged bystanders: They loudly vent or brag to cope with psychological pain/pleasure. - The institutional evaluators: They methodically audit what went right or wrong to improve. Over social media, I see lots of emotionally charged angry bystanders whose views or comments of the SIA's Vistara-Air Ind...

Mohammud had 3 sons, all died at child-birth. His line came through his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali ibn Abi Talib, via their sons Hasan and Husayn . In the Islamic world, many claim descendancy from the Prophet. They are accepted in traditional community but none proven via actual DNA test. People who claim this lineage are called Sayyids (or Sadat). This status exists in both Sunni and Shia communities across the Muslim world. In Twelver Shia Islam (the dominant form in Iran), the Twelve Imams are regarded as descendants of Husayn . Many religious scholars, including some ayatollahs, claim to belong to these lines. Visual marker in Iran and some other Shia contexts: black turban = claimed Sayyid (descent from the Prophet); white turban = non-Sayyid scholar.    Qatadah ibn Idris. leader of the tribe of Banu Qatadah, seized control of Mecca in 1201 and founded the dynasty that held the Sharifate of Mecca continuously until 1925. The  tribe claims desce...

I take a pause on my next China post to ponder on this interesting development because it further enhances understanding of the "carry trade" of MAS and PBOC in my two recent articles. The next China post is about how the country did the plumbing to fix the problems of their financial system, how fixing one leak creates another leak elsewhere. It's about how errors in policy can lead to serious structural problems in the economy. This Japan story is a good prelude to the next post as it deals with the difficult tasks of plumbing the system. In early August US Treasury reportedly provided the bank of Japan USD5Bn-USD10Bn to help prop up the Yen. There are lots of rhetorical comments in legacy and social media. If a country sucks up to Donald Trump, the US will jump in to help. US helps Japan by printing money, and in the end, takes away Japan's US Treasuries, thus clearing the American debt without paying anything. Trump admin is fascist and bulldozing the Fed's i...

The post title is as audacious as Prof Jeffrey Sachs' prediction in 2019. Sachs' boast has about 3 years to go and there are no signs of anywhere near realisation. This post has about 15 minutes read time to try to convince you. In the past few years you have been pounded by media with one story after another of the RMB being used in oil trades and countries agreeing to invoice in RMB. It drives the sense of a serious rise in the adoption of the yuan as a world reserve currency.  Let's look at one metric to see the major currencies share as reserve currency in 2019 and 2025. True enough, USD has shedded 4.56%, but RMB has gained by only 0.09%. The shift to RMB stalled at the front door of Beijing's capital controls. The shifting allocation of global reserves away from USD is surprisingly into the smaller currencies This is a phenomenon called the "Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance." The driver is technology. The digitization of foreign exchange markets...

China has literally constructed a huge dam that is holding back a massive amount of sterilised renmenbi threatening to break out and devastate downstream. Many serious structural problems exist in China's financial system and this dam is a good analogy of one of them.  I am no Sinophobe, but simply trying to provide explanations of complex economic and financial situations in a way a lay person can appreciate. I want to go deep into the structural problems China's central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBOC), has been struggling with for decades. It's a long story to be spread over a few posts, at the end of which, it circles back to Singapore and you will understand in a connected world, how the Chinese problem filters down to money laundering incidents on our shores.  And for those who sing high praises of Chinese golden age and dedollarisation, difference of opinion is perfectly fine. But I hope you stick around and let's go down the rabbit hole together. I h...

MAS Managing Director Chia Der Jiun summarised the performance for y/e 31 Mar 2026: Before anyone brings out the champagne one has to understand that MAS is not a for-profit entity and therefore profitability is not a measure of its performance. As a central bank, apart from its regulatory function and leadership role in the development of the financial industry, its core mission is to manage the general price level (inflation) and liquidity in the financial market. The measure of its performance is not determined by its profitability. MAS could have managed inflation well and yet be making losses. Whether MAS has managed its mission well, I leave it to the reader's opinions. I just want to talk about its financials. MAS financial performance is fundamentally dependent on 2 factors: 1. The SGD exchange rate trend 2. Market Externalities - interest rates, equities market The FY2025/2026 financial results illustrate the profound tension between MAS’s domestic policy objectives an...