Money lessons from London
THERE are benefits in plumbing the depths of our personal histories and mining our memories for lessons to help us today and tomorrow. As I start this column early this month — way ahead of my writing delivery deadline — I’m on a British Airways flight sitting on the tarmac of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5.
The first leg of my journey was a 13-hour BA flight from KLIA to London. I had a brief transit there and then boarded this smaller plane for a short hop to the land of engineering excellence, Germany.
My wife and I are headed to Berlin for a holiday tied to our 20th wedding anniversary but which gratifyingly — for me, at least — includes delivering an abridged version of my signature financial planning workshop ‘Building Your Financial Fortress’ to Malaysians and some others in Berlin, at our embassy. I’m looking forward to it and am happy to be of service to embassy staff; I consider it a tiny contribution toward helping to rebuild a better Malaysia post-GE14.
Now, returning to my thoughts at Heathrow: I lived in and around London for seven years from September 1982 to October 1989, during my malleable years from 18 to 25. In that time I studied, worked, made friends, and solidified much of my personal worldview.
The 1980s were largely defined by the global spread of democracy helped along by the free market interactions between President Ronald Reagan and the Iron Lady of Britain, Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher.
Reagan and Thatcher’s strong personal bond catalysed many of the free market explosions seen through that seminal decade, which fuelled a phenomenal bull run in the free West, and led to the start of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the failed communist state of East Germany in late 1989, which continued in stages throughout 1990; and then to the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 into 15 different countries.
Good times for a capitalist like me. Sadly, my outlook nowadays is a little grimmer. Here’s why...
In recent years, each time I travel to the West and need to change my Malaysian ringgit (RM) to US$ or € or £, I get depressed for one obvious reason. Come to think of it, I also experience that sinking feeling each time I head down south into Singapore.
I’m sure you can guess the reason.
WE NEED MERITOCRACY
Our currency, the RM, is relatively weak. To my mind, that’s partly caused by flawed long-term government policies that did not strengthen meritocracy throughout our country’s institutions and, instead, opportunistically and unwisely embraced falling standards in education, governance, intellectual rigour, English proficiency, and collective integrity.
The political hijacking of the mechanics of implementing the important goals of the New Economic Policy by self-serving politicians of low-calibre resulted in Malaysia losing ground against much of the rest of the world.
A short description I just came across in Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s outstanding book Billion Dollar Whale describes the state of Malaysian affairs immediately after GE 13 in 2013:
“With a national income of (US)$10,000 per person, a fifth of the United States’ level, Malaysia was stuck in the middle-income trap, no longer poor but not yet rich. In an earlier era, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan had reached developed-world status. Now, rampant corruption was condemning Malaysia, as well as Brazil, Russia, and a number of other nations, to mediocrity.”
And so as I mull upon my long distant years in London, I’m reminded of lessons I learnt there that might prove useful to us all today in Malaysia (and in our embassies around the world):
1. There is a way forward even after bad leadership, if good leaders arise; 2. Don’t spend all you have plus some more;
3. Buy to permanently own a portion of our nation’s productive capacity; and 4. Care for the weak even as you reward the bold.
Maggie Thatcher, whether you hate or respect her, reversed Britain’s 30-year slide down global competitiveness rankings caused by socialist trade unions that squeezed out the lifeblood from Britain’s struggling companies and caused politicians to ramp up taxes.
PLACE IN THE SUN
On a personal note, I left the U.K. in late 1989 mired in credit card debt because I was always short of money there despite working as much as I could. I covered my funding gap with cash advances from various credit card providers. It took me years to pay off all those after returning to Malaysia. It was a satisfying day when I did.
If we manage our money well, we will spend less than we earn and save and invest the difference. That’s the key to honest, abiding riches, as opposed to unsavoury ‘fat cat’ enrichment via deceit, kleptocracy and theft, which are outlined in Wright and Hope’s timely book on Malaysia and 1MDB.
Admittedly, what Britain could NOT do perfectly in the wake of its capitalist revival was caring for and protecting the weak and the marginalised. As such, I do believe that Malaysia, if it’s led well for a decade or two, can do a much better job of protecting the weakest in society, ideally regardless of race or religion, even as we ramp up efficiency and effectiveness to reclaim our place in the sun
© 2018 Rajen Devadason Read his free articles at www. FreeCoolArticles.com; he may be connected with on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajendevadason, or via rajen@ RajenDevadason.com You may follow him on Twitter @RajenDevadason