THE government has developed a new weapon that destroys people but leaves buildings standing.

It’s called the stock market. The Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange had been in a prolonged state of torpor for so long that few people remembered the last time it had a pulse. Given the state of the economy and the pace of infl ation, most fund managers had revised their portfolio weightings to 50 per cent cash and 50 per cent canned goods. In fact, it was no laughing matter when regional analysts said that the Malaysian market had become a laughing stock but that was okay with the authorities because they were pragmatic people who knew that laughing stock merely meant cattle with a sense of humour. Actually, it was grim and stern stuff and this was why Bursa Malaysia was now thinking of merging with the country’s largest laundrette. There were obvious synergies that could be reaped from such a union: either way, you were taken to the cleaners. A pall had descended over Malaysia, the once-halcyon land where fi shmongers who didn’t know a priceearnings multiple from a red herring used to make more money from the stock market in the early 1990s than their trade in ikan kembong. They no longer spent time on their mobile phones chanting “buy” or “sell”. Instead, they just went “Ai-yah!” In the past, it was stocks that split, now they were falling apart and it was the brokers who were splitting and it was not even clear which brokers everybody was talking about because it was hard to distinguish between “stock” and “pawn” in these sad and turbulent times. Even so, the good news was that no one was going broke in the Crash of 2008 because they had all gone bust way back in 1998. It was clear that danger was everywhere and that the only killings possible these days were those of investors in Transmile who were being slowly choked to death by the inexorable plummeting of a stock once touted as the Cheetah of Cargo Carriers. But that had been a lot of bull and today the smartest animal on Bursa Malaysia was no longer the bull or the bear, it was the chicken. Fundamentally speaking, of course, everything was hunky-dory with good corporate earnings underpinned by a robust economy that was creating 100,000 jobs a year. The bad news was that all those jobs were reserved for Indonesian construction workers who had short-sold Transmile shares well before Zarinah Anwar of the Securities Commission could say “corporate fraud”. Ever the compassionate body, the Securities Commission decided to come out with a booklet to advise hapless investors how not to panic in times of bear markets. If at fi rst you don’t succeed, it advised crisply, “you might want to give skydiving a miss”. It was cogent advice and it cheered up the analysts who had always thought previously that if at fi rst one didn’t succeed, one had to destroy all evidence that one had tried in the fi rst place. That was why they were always revising their “buy” calls to “hold” signals while bemoaning the “lack of fresh leads” which was a surefi re indicator of a lousy market. Another sign that told one to stray away was the phrase “sellers” outnumbered buyers” which was a non-sequitur because for every buyer, there had to be a seller for that was how markets worked. What you really needed to know was this: who was the sucker? ● S. Jayasankaran is the bureau chief of Singapore’s Business Times and can be contacted at sankaranjaya@yahoo.com

Source: Malay Mail – July 2, 2008