Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Why SGD?

I have been advocating lately about keeping some cash in SGD.(I know this sounds a bit like a Malaysian "traitor" and will be condemn badly by Tun Mahathir if he came across my blog). Many might just ask me, why SGD ?
Singapore has been suffering from high inflation lately with steep fall in export revenue especially last two months. My wife visited Singapore 2 days back hoping to get some nice shirt for me and guess what, the same shirt I bought last year cost more now even during the Great Singapore Sale! Inflation, this is the reality that we have to face it, even in Singapore.
Singapore has limited land and manufacturing activities will not be able to sustain Singaporeans' cutting edge lifestyle anymore. Singaporean government, dubbed The Singapore Inc. , is gradually changing Singapore into a high tech, commercial and financial economy driven country. This reminds me about SimCity game where old factories are gradually faced out and replaced by high tech research labs and commercial offices as your population grows and as the city gets better.
This is what exactly Singapore is doing. No doubt, introducing stronger currency will hurt manufacturing driven economy especially South East Asian countries. Therefore, by getting rid of low cost manufacturing, strengthening the local currency will bring more good than bad. As the country is less dependent on manufacturing sector, stronger currency will not deplete the trade surplus as country's income is not dependent on this particular sector anymore. On the other hand, strengthening currency will cut down inflation(for a small country that relies heavily on imports), attract talents to work with high salaries and also attract depositors to keep their cash in SGD with Sg banks. Yes, Singapore is morphing itself into the so-called "Eastern Monaco".(Monaco is a small country where a lot of Europeans keeps their cash with Monaco banks and makes the country super rich)
Let's do some simple analysis. Malaysian's MYR is depegged from Singapore's SGD since 1992. What are the changes in terms of % for MYR/SGD currency exchange rate from 1992-2008? The maths is simple:
1992 - SGD 1 = MYR 1
2008 - SGD 1 = MYR 2.4

(2.4-1)/1 = 1.4/1 = 1.4 = 140%

16 years with 140 % of difference is not bad at all. 8.75% per year on average, which is better than the all-time-high foreign FD interest rate NZD is providing. Sounds sexy , huh ?

Many of my friends did the math and told me, "Cannot be la, SGD cannot be keep rising. You mean it will rise until it hits the same level as USD, are you kidding? There is always a limit"
Let's look at 2007-2008 rates. (with reference from BNM website) During June 2007, the rates was 2.20 and as of 30 June 2008, the rates was 2.41, there is a 9.51% rise in terms of exchange rates. If SGD rise another 8 % by June 2009 , the exchange rate will be something like 2.6, which sound possible. Besides that, we are really not sure how Malaysia politics will mess up our entire economy, turning our currency into "banana papers".
Again, the next question, why SGD? Why not Euro, CHF or GBP? Haha, the answer is simple, Singapore is so damn near and Malaysian can even open an account with Malaysian MyKAD. In any case of emergency, you can withdraw your cash from Singapore on a day trip. So , why make your life hard?
So, if you have some cash to spare, this is a good and safe option to go for, don't you think so ?

2 comments:

lsb said...

You don,t cal return in that manner, at 10% your double roughly in 7 years. I am to lazy to look up the table to see what is the p.a return for 16 years, but it wont be good and not the straight division of 8.75.

Charles said...

Hi lsb,

Thanks for your comments. I am lazy to calculate as well. I have just calculated, it is about 6.5 % per annum on a compounded rate. Take note that I am not calculating the interest rates which is provided by banks. In Singapore, the typical FD rates is about 2 % per annum. That will add up to 8.5 % as well.