Free Anwar: Najib now telling outright lies about the economy

The truth about the Malaysian economy cannot be found in Malaysia’s mainstream media, ruling party politicians or even, sadly, from the Department of Statistics or Bank Negara.  The mainstream media, print and broadcast, are craven tools of the ruling BN.

Ruling party politicians are for the most part corrupt hanger-ons rubber-stamping their way to continued survival and with little knowledge of economic issues. And economic data like CPI and GDP from government departments cannot be trusted because they are fiddling with it.

Fudging the economic numbers for GE-13

Take the CPI (Consumer Price Index) from the Department of Statistics for example. It should be a much depended upon number to assess the rate of inflation in Malaysia. But it is generally dismissed with a laugh, so disconnected is it from the reality on the ground. Bank Negara’s policies last year were not based on the nation’s economic state but on the BN’s need to win elections.

Witness the fact that the last meeting of the MPC (Monetary Policy Committee) in early November declined to raise the interest rate when the right decision would have been to raise it in view of the rampant inflation in the country. But that may have affected GDP and Najib is intent on using the GDP numbers to have himself re-elected. So BNM is content to make bad policy decisions to satisfy the transient interests of an inept economic manager, Prime Minister Najib Razak.

In the long term, Malaysia will suffer, because a price level that goes up is not likely to easily come down. It is past time that BNM measured by a maximum by an absolute number for the inflation rate. Even the 3.75 % (held low by artifice) is too much as BNM well knows. One to two percent would be the correct figure. Even the European crisis may not be good enough reason to hold to the interest rate as our budget is dangerously deficit.

Why no lowering of GDP forecast yet?

Meanwhile Najib has not bothered to correct downward his GDP forecast for 2012, even in the face of overwhelming external factors. Not least of which is the contraction in Singapore’s economy in Q4 2011. He would have you believe that Malaysia functions in a vacuum. It does not and our growth rate will slow significantly.

Those worthies who point to the ETPs as Malaysia’s way out of trouble are either mistaken, or outright liars. The ETPs are a mish-mash of unconnected whose only commonality is that Najib needed something to announce and this project was on-going. In some cases the projects were only worth tens of millions, irrevelant in their effect on the economy. Some of the projects were not even in Malaysia!

To counter this, Pemandu has started to measure them as factors in the GNI(Gross National Income) rather than GDP. It is in fact, wool over your eyes. An MRO project in Hyderabad helps the economy in Andhra Pradesh, not Malaysia. There will be no benefit of economic multipliers in the Malaysian economy for this investment.

Most dangerous when lies extend to the economy and financial markets

We are being lied to by the BN government each and every day on the economy. There is nothing else for them to do, they must cover it up at least until the next election.

The only way out of this economic mess that we find ourselves in is to cast out the Barisan Nasional from the seat of power in the next election. With them will go the corrupt and the incompetent whose ineptness and greed got us into this mess in the first place. And in its place we must have a new government, a shining clean one to lead us out of this morass.

For now, only one man can do this, and that man is Anwar Ibrahim. It is only Anwar who can hold together the three parties which together form Pakatan Rakyat, the alternative that rocked the BN in its complacent world in 2008, and has proven itself a workable entity in the four years since.

Earning the trust of trading partners

It is only Anwar who can, by pure force of charisma, bring the rakyat with him as he reforms the country. Anwar’s rise will also finally earn Malaysia the trust of its trading partners and the external world; a trust which Mahathir lost by his egoism and borderline lunacy. We will be stronger as a nation too, because Anwar will unite us into one nation, where the BN has always strived to divide us into a quarrelsome Babel.

Malaysia needs Anwar Ibrahim, and most desperately now. If he is jailed by the plots of evil men, the artifices of little men, then the loss will be ours. We must stand with Anwar Ibrahim if Malaysia is to progress and be saved.

Bebaskan Anwar!

Malaysia Chronicle