Silencing the Lions!

It was truly a fateful day for the MCA in Malaysia. The second largest party of the Barisan Nasional went for a referendum of sorts to determine who should indeed lead the much battered MCA.

Fateful Double 10th it was. Using the historical memorable date of the independence of mainland China to stage this EGM, more than 2,304 delegates silenced the lions and sent them packing. They were tired of the bickering. They could smell the "Et tu Brutus" refrain,orchestrated by "known and seen' hands of the President and his men, to killed off the opposition,the much maligned Deputy who continues to be tainted by a sex scandal.

The party is now in shambles like a rooster without a head. This Thursday, October 15 will see a procedural MCA Central Committee meeting that will decide what to do with the fell-out of the EGM. Morally, The President, defeated in a unprecedented 'No Confidence' vote should just resign honourably and ride away into the political void. As for the erstwhile ex-Deputy, he has been granted his wish to be an ordinary member until his dying day.


Anyone can guess the future of MCA.

With third rate Leos coming in to fill the vacuum at the top, the once proud MCA will now slowly be put into political wilderness and lose its glory forever.

Expect non-partisan members to desert in droves to the DAP and the PKR!

The Rhythm of the American Heart

Slice it, dice it anyway you want it.

But truth be told, the American Dream is no more,at least that is the way it is showing from Corporate America.

This article was taken from the blog of 'Where is Ze Moola'.

Currently,circa Friday October 9, 2009, every 13 seconds there is a foreclosure filing in US.

I paraphrase:

What is the rhythm of the American heart these days?

It is in aberration. It beats to the rhythm of a crisis that threatens to choke off hopes for a recovery in the US housing market as it destroys hundreds of billions of dollars in property values a year.

There are more than 6,600 home foreclosure filings per day, according to the Centre for Responsible Lending, a non-partisan watchdog group based in Durham, North Carolina. With nearly two million already this year, the moving flood of foreclosures shows no sign of abating any time soon.

If anything, the country’s worst housing downturn since record-keeping began in the late 19th century, may only get worse since foreclosures, which started with subprime borrowers, have now sadly moved on to the much bigger prime loan market on the back of mounting unemployment.

In congressional testimony last month, Michael Barr, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, said more than six million families could face foreclosure over the next three years.

“The recent crisis in the housing sector has devastated families and communities across the country and is at the centre of our financial crisis and economic downturn,” Barr said.

A September report by a foreclosure taskforce appointed by Florida’s Supreme Court pointed to a shift in the root cause of foreclosures.

“People are no longer defaulting simply because of a change in the payment structure of their loan. They are defaulting because of lost jobs or reduced hours or pay,” it said.

Florida had the country’s highest rate of homes – 23% – that were either in foreclosure or delinquent on mortgage payments in the second quarter, and the report said: “The latest news for Florida is horrifying.”

A recent pickup in sales and home prices in some regions has been heralded as a sign that the crisis in residential real estate may be close to bottoming out, after the steepest price decline since at least 1890.

But nearly half of recent sales have been attributed to foreclosures or “short sales” at bargain-basement prices.

Even as the US economy seems to be recovering from its worst recession since the Great Depression, mortgage delinquencies continue to rise. And that adds risk to any relatively upbeat assessment, since foreclosures depress the value of nearby properties while eroding the net worth of homeowners and the tax base for communities nationwide.

The Centre for Responsible Lending says foreclosures are on track to wipe out US$502bil in property values this year.

That spillover effect from foreclosures is one reason why Celia Chen of Moody’s Economy.com says nationwide home prices won’t regain the peak levels they reached in 2006 until 2020.[This is indeed scary!]

In states hardest-hit by the housing bust, like Florida and California, the rebound would take until 2030, Chen predicted. [This is indeed even more scary!]

“The default rates, the delinquency rates, are still rising,” Chen said. “Rising joblessness combined with a large degree of negative equity are going to cause foreclosures to increase.”

Anyone doubting that the recovery in US real estate prices would be long and hard should take a look at Japan, Chen said. Prices there are still off about 50% from the peak they hit 15 years ago.

Jay Brinkmann, chief economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association, said foreclosures were expected to peak in the second half of 2010. But that forecast is based on a projection that unemployment will begin falling after topping out “barely in double digits by the middle of next year.”

Last week, the Labour Department reported the unemployment rate rose to a 26-year high of 9.8% in September, in the latest evidence that a turnaround in the jobs market is the missing link in the economic recovery.

Since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed people has soared 7.6 million to 15.1 million. In Florida, unemployment is hovering at a nearly 40-year high of 10.7%, led by a steep decline in construction jobs.

Modifications and ‘monsters’

Mortgage modifications, the centrepiece of a plan unveiled by the Obama administration in March to help as many as nine million struggling borrowers hold onto their homes, have gotten off to a sluggish start.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates US banks, said in a Sept 30 report that banks and loan services stepped up efforts to help distressed homeowners in the second quarter, more than tripling the loan modifications that reduced principal.

“This trend represents a significant shift from earlier quarters, when the vast majority of loan modifications either did not change monthly payments or increased them,” it said.

Only a relatively small number of homeowners have seen financial relief from so-called “loan workouts” so far, however, and government officials acknowledge that far more is needed to reverse the national tide of foreclosures.

Help would be more than welcome in areas like Miami Gardens where there is a pervasive sense of anger about banks and the blight caused by foreclosures in a city that once boasted one of the highest home-ownership rates in the country.

A predominantly African-American community of 111,000 people, just north of Miami, it now has a 13% foreclosure rate – the second highest in Florida – and a glut of shuttered or boarded-up homes.

“The banks were bailed out first. We all assumed that they were going to turn around and help other people but that didn’t happen,” said Ruby Milligan, 61, a teacher who took early retirement after suffering a mild stroke several years ago.

Milligan received a foreclosure notice from Deutsche Bank in August last year, but still lives in her Miami Gardens home, fearing a knock on the door with an eviction order any time.

Her retiree income is considered insufficient to qualify her for any modification of the adjustable-rate home-equity loan that she took out when the property was worth far more than it is today, she says.

“I feel that the banks should write these mortgages down,” Milligan said. “They wrote these bad mortgages, they created these monsters.”

One way of easing the crisis would be so-called “cramdowns”, a measure giving bankruptcy judges authorisation to write down the principal on homeowners’ mortgages.

A similar measure helped curtail family farm foreclosures in the 1980s, but Representative Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat, said the banking lobby killed it when it came up for approval by Congress earlier this year.

“We fought that fight before and lost it,” Miller said. “The industry will continue to oppose it.” — Reuters

The saddest part was the following quote:

* “The banks were bailed out first. We all assumed that they were going to turn around and help other people but that didn’t happen,” said Ruby Milligan, 61, a teacher who took early retirement after suffering a mild stroke several years ago.

Sigh! Help the rich and screw the poor? Sigh!

And it does not help when the poor reads how many millions in bonuses the bankers will receive!

Yeah, rewarded for doing what???

How?

Worse is over? Or worse is yet to come?

Shale Oil-New Hopes for Petronas?

With a new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States spreading to the rest of the world, there is now elevated hope for a huge expansion of global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel.There is now fresh new hope for Petronas.

Italian and Norwegian oil engineers and geologists have arrived in Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to learn how to extract gas from layers of a black rock called shale. Companies are leasing huge tracts of land across Europe for exploration. They are gathering rocks and scrutinizing Asian and North African geological maps in search of other fields.

The global drilling rush is still in its early stages. But energy analysts are already predicting that shale could reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. They said they believed that gas reserves in many countries could increase over the next two decades, comparable with the 40 per cent increase in the United States in recent years.

“It’s a breakout play that is going to identify gigantic resources around the world,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University. “That will change the geopolitics of natural gas.”

More extensive use of natural gas could aid in reducing global warming, because gas produces fewer emissions of greenhouse gases than either oil or coal. China and India, which have growing economies that rely heavily on coal for electricity, appear to have large potential for production of shale gas. Larger gas reserves would encourage developing countries to convert more of their transportation fleets to use gas rather than gasoline.

Shale is a sedimentary rock rich in organic material that is found in many parts of the world. It was of little use as a source of gas until about a decade ago, when American companies developed new techniques to fracture the rock and drill horizontally.

Because so little drilling has been done in shale fields outside of the United States and Canada, gas analysts have made a wide array of estimates for how much shale gas could be tapped globally. Even the most conservative estimates are enormous, projecting at least a 20 per cent increase in the world’s known reserves of natural gas.

One recent study by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting group, calculated that the recoverable shale gas outside of North America could turn out to be equivalent to 211 years’ worth of gas consumption in the United States at the present level of demand, and maybe as much as 690 years. The low figure would represent a 50 per cent increase in the world’s known gas reserves, and the high figure, a 160 per cent increase.

The projections suggest that the new method of producing gas “is the biggest energy innovation of the decade,” said Daniel Yergin, chairman of the Cambridge consulting group. “And the amazing thing is there was no grand opening ceremony for it. It just snuck up.”

Over the last five years, production of gas from shale has spread across wide swaths of Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. All the new production has produced a glut of gas in the United States, helping to drive down gas prices and utility costs.

Now American companies are looking abroad for lucrative shale fields in countries hungry for more energy. They are focusing particularly on Europe, where gas prices are sometimes twice what they are in the United States, and large shale beds are located close to some cities.

Exxon Mobil has drilled a few exploratory wells in Germany in recent months. Devon Energy is teaming up with Total, the French oil company, seeking approval to drill in France. ConocoPhillips announced recently that it had signed an agreement with a subsidiary of a small British firm to explore a million acres in the Baltic Basin of Poland.

Early estimates of recoverable European shale gas resources range up to 400 trillion cubic feet, less than half the industry’s estimates of what is recoverable in the United States. But European energy executives say they are excited about the prospects because the Continent’s conventional gas reserves are too small to meet demand.

“It is obvious to everybody that it has huge potential,” said Oivind Reinertsen, president of StatoilHydro USA and Mexico, a Norwegian company with growing shale interests. “You see a lot of land-grabbing by different companies in Europe, potentially spreading to the Far East, China and India.”

Donald I. Hertzmark, a consultant who advises multinational oil companies on gas projects, said that in a decade or so, the new shale gas resources would improve Europe’s ability to withstand any future reduction in Russian pipeline shipments. In 2006 and again last winter, Russia cut off gas deliveries shipped through Ukraine because of disputes between the two countries, causing shortages around Europe.

European companies are buying large interests in shale fields in the United States, partly to supply the American market, but also to learn the specialised mapping and drilling techniques required for shale gas.

Several of the European companies have entered into partnerships with smaller American companies. ENI of Italy paid US$280 million (RM980 million) in May for a stake in a 13,000-acre gas field north of Fort Worth operated by Quicksilver Resources. ENI has a crew of four engineers, a geologist and a geophysicist in Texas to learn from Quicksilver personnel.

One of the biggest marriages is between Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma City and its strategic partner StatoilHydro.

Seeking cash, Chesapeake agreed to sell Statoil a large stake in its Marcellus shale holdings, centred in Pennsylvania, for US$3.9 billion last November. The two companies are looking at shale fields in China, India, Australia and other countries. Seven Statoil employees are working in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania learning to map and fracture shale and calculate shale gas pressures, and more are coming.

“We know the shale is out there,” said Lars Erik Oino, a Statoil geologist working at Chesapeake headquarters here, as he rubbed hydrochloric acid on a shale sample to test its mineral makeup. “This could have a huge impact on the European energy situation.”

So, with potential new gas supplies, God has given countries like Malaysia a second chance at better resource utilization for economic development.

Value Adding KL Sentral Park

Malaysian Resources Corp Bhd (MRCB) is set to recoup its RM36 million in IT spending on integrated information technology (IT) solutions in KL Sentral Park in about 3 years.

The IT solutions package constitute about 5% of the RM720mil gross development value for the project situated within the KL Sentral enclave.

KL Sentral Park, which is scheduled to be completed by 2011, is the first pilot project utilising the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities framework and involves integrating Cisco’s end-to-end technology and building solutions. When completed, KL Sentral Park will out-rival nearby Midvalley City for the tourist dollars and the urban shopper's ringgits.

Shahril said the deployment of such infrastructure would raise the value of the project and deliver savings for the company.

“We expect to have additional revenue from services and lower operating costs in terms of return on investment,” he said after a tripartite memorandum of understanding signing ceremony between Cisco Malaysia, MRCB Land and Datacraft Advanced Network Services Sdn Bhd yesterday.

Shahril said the move was part of MRCB’s plan to incorporate state-of-the-art technologies in all its property developments under MRCB Land to promote sustainable, green and smart urban development practices.

“In terms of operating costs, we expect savings of 10% to 15%, mostly in energy,” he said.

The deployment of the IT solutions are expected to increase services revenue by 30% to 40%.

Shahril said MRCB was also looking at implementing similar comprehensive IT solutions at its other transport hubs, particularly Penang Sentral.

As the prime systems integrator, Datacraft will lead the project management and deployment of solutions for KL Sentral Park.

These include a core multiple Internet Protocol platform to integrate information and communications technology, and building automation networks.

Looks like MRCB finally found its niche in KL Sentral Park after a long wild-goose chase everywhere,thanks largely to the government.

Rocky Mountain High's Rocky Recovery Survey

Global economists-be watchful. Not all can be well in the engine of growth in the USA ,notwithstanding progress in the Asian economies of China and India and possibly, in Australia.

The Wall Street Journal says its latest forecasting survey of US economists shows a rocky road to recovery. It says the worst recession since the Great Depression has left a scorched landscape that will weigh on the labour market and the broader economy for years to come.

The 48 surveyed economists, not all of whom answer every question, expect the economy to bounce back from four quarters of contraction with 3.1% growth in gross domestic product at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the just-ended third quarter. Expansion is seen continuing through the first half of 2010, though at a slower rate. But the massive downturn has left an open wound in the labour market that will take years to heal. On average, the economists don't expect unemployment to fall under 6% until 2013; unemployment in September hit 9.8%.

On average the economists expect the unemployment rate to peak at 10.2% next February. But even once the employment situation stops getting worse, economists expect recovery to come slowly. It took just 14 months for the unemployment rate to rise from 5.8% to its current level. On average, the economists say it will take nearly four years for the rate to drop below 6% again.

In the meantime, the unemployed will be loath to spend or borrow. They are less likely to move and are more likely to default on mortgages and loans.

The survey of economists shows they that more technical sectors are likely to yield the most jobs in years ahead. Asked to rank the sectors where job growth is most likely, some 37% of economists listed education and health services as their first choice. Another 38% listed it as their second. Professional and business services were also ranked highly with a third of economists putting the sector as their first choice and a quarter listed it as their second choice. Jobs that required less education did far worse. Just 12% said construction was most likely to create jobs in the future. Only 7% said manufacturing.

Also on Thursday, a survey issued by the Springboard Project, an independent commission under the chairmanship of William Green, head of the consultancy firm Accenture, which was promoted by the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of the largest American companies, reported that about 65% of employers said they expect all or most of their hires will be people with an associate’s degree or higher.

More than half of the 601 managers and executives surveyed said more technical skills, higher degrees and better qualifications would be a requirement required over the next four years.

Half of employers say they currently have such a serious gap between their needs and employees’ skills that it affects their productivity.

The survey says workers also understand the value of training but, like employers, are confronting barriers to making it a reality.

Sixty-two percent of workers say a convincing reason to pursue training is that the future economy will be extremely demanding, and if their skills are not up to date, someone will pass them by. However, a large proportion of workers are not pursuing training and education because of practical obstacles. Workers cite cost, convenience, and lack of reliable information on what type of training will lead to a job or higher salaries as the top three factors preventing them from enhancing their skills and improving their education.

P.S.: For Malaysians, it pays to take note that retraining for the right skills possibly at the Master's level will indeed be an asset to help you get the better jobs.

If You have A Mother,read on.........

This is one story that everyone who has a mother should read.

Profoundly heartbreaking, if there was one.

After 21 years of marriage, my wife wanted me to take another woman out to dinner and a movie. She said, "I love you but I know this other woman loves you and would love to spend some time with you."

The other woman that my wife wanted me to visit was my mother,who has been a widow for 19 years,but the demands of my work and my three children had made it possible to visit her only occasionally.

That night I called to invite her to go out for dinner and a movie.

'What's wrong, are you well,' she asked?

My mother is the type of woman who suspects that a late night call or a surprise invitation is a sign of bad news.

'I thought that it would be pleasant to be with you,' I responded.'Just the two of us.'She thought about it for a moment, and then said, 'I would like that very much.'

That Friday after work, as I drove over to pick her up I was a bit nervous.

When I arrived at her house, I noticed that she too seemed to be nervous about our date.

She waited in the door with her coat on.

She had curled her hair and was wearing the dress that she had worn to celebrate her last wedding anniversary.

She smiled from a face that was as radiant as an angel.

'I told my friends that I was going to go out with my son, and they were impressed,'
she said, as she got into the car.

'They can't wait to hear about our meeting'.

We went to a restaurant that, although not elegant, was very nice and cozy.

My mother took my arm as if she were the First Lady.

After we sat down, I had to read the menu. Large print.

Half way through the entries, I lifted my eyes and saw Mom sitting there staring at me.

A nostalgic smile was on her lips.

'It was I who used to have to read the menu when you were small,'she said.

'Then it's time that you relax and let me return the favour,'I responded.

During the dinner, we had an agreeable conversation, nothing extra-ordinary,
but catching up on recent events of each other's life.

We talked so much that we missed the movie.

As we arrived at her house later,she said, 'I'll go out with you again, but only if you let me invite you.'

I agreed.

'How was your dinner date?' asked my wife when I got home.

'Very mice. Much more so than I could have imagined,' I answered.

A few days later, my mother died of a massive heart attack.

It happened so suddenly that I didn't have time to do anything for her.

Some time later, I received an envelope with a copy of a restaurant receipt
from the same place Mother and I had dined.

An attached note said:

'I paid this bill in advance.

I wasn't sure that I could be there;

But nevertheless, I paid for two plates–One for you and the other for your wife.

You will never know what that night meant for me.

I love you, my son.'

At that moment, I understood the importance of saying in time:'I Love you!'
and to give our loved ones the time that they deserve.

Nothing in Life is more important than God and your family.

Give them the time they deserve, because these things cannot be put off till 'Some other time.'

Tun Mahathir: Charity begins in your Heart!

I have taken liberty to take this from my ex-prime Minister's blog [http://chedet.co.cc/chedetblog/2009/10/malaysian-industries.html.] I think it is a very meaningful piece on how love for one's country should be extended to one's own products.

Tun Dr. Mahathir wrote like this.

1. I feel sorry for Malaysian manufacturers. They find it difficult and sometimes impossible to market their products in the country because somehow Malaysians, including the Government and its agencies cannot believe that Malaysian products are as good, if not better than imported goods.

2. When Malaysian products cannot be sold at home, it becomes almost impossible to convince foreign buyers to buy them. The question that foreigners often ask is whether Malaysians especially the Government have bought them.

3. Despite this failure to market Malaysian products locally, some have still managed to be marketed abroad. And some have been very successful.

4. These Malaysians are not asking for protection or even favours. All they want is to be properly evaluated against foreign competitors when they make bids. But somehow they seem to fail always.

5. There are excuses of course. The foreign suppliers have been supplying for years and years. They just cannot be dropped.

6. Even when the products have been well accepted abroad, the Government and its agencies cannot be convinced.

7. The Government wants to be transparent. Perhaps if awards of contracts are published just as offers of contracts are, then the public and the local businessmen would know who gets what, how many times and for how long. The contract process should also be made known. If contracts are to be for five years then we should know why contracts are given for longer periods.

8. Then Malaysians would know why they have been failing all these while. They would then be able to take necessary steps to become competitive. In fact other foreign suppliers too can take corrective action.

9. At the moment we can read the advertisements on new projects up for tender. But who wins the tender is not publicised.

10. An open Government keen to be transparent should do this. That it was never done before is no reason it cannot be done now. Previously no one promised to be transparent. But now we all hear about transparency.

11. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is not coming in as much as before. We cannot compete with China or Vietnam, not even with Thailand and Indonesia. While we should continue to promote FDI, we should also help the local investors. We should remember that their earnings stay in the country, much more than the earnings of foreign owned industries.

12. If we help them our industries can become world players. At the moment we do not have our Sony or Hitachi or Samsung or Hyundai. We have the technical capacities for truly Malaysian products and companies to be as well-known as those of Japan and Korea.

13. We merely need a little boost from Malaysians, particularly from the Government and its numerous agencies and companies.

14. I hesitate to write this article because I fear that those in charge would make life even more difficult for Malaysian companies, presuming that they had complained to me.

15. But what I say here is public knowledge. We should really be helping ourselves.

To Dear Tun, as you rightly put it, many Malaysian companies have found jobs overseas. YTL and Kuok Brothers for instance. Lim Kok Wing has been franchising his outfits in so many nations today. It is hard to really catch up with him.

I think some of the efforts that Tun started like the formation of the Malaysian sogoshosa should be given new blood again by the current Najib government.