Another Not Relevant Day In Malaysia

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I was scanning through the Malaysian news headlines on Google this morning. Here is a quick list :
1. AG : I was advised Thomas agreed bla bla bla
2. Bersatu Youth : Najib, Rosmah, Zahid to bla bla bla
3.  Putrajaya's Masjid reopens bla bla bla
4. Sink or swim? Analysts divided on Mukhriz's bla bla bla
5. Jadikan Anwar bla bla bla
6. Najib hits back at Dr M bla bla bla
7. A parliament vote against bla bla bla
8. Mukhriz's position to be bla bla bla
9. Dr M reminisces about bla bla bla
10. Locals are picky bla bla bla
These are totally useless and irrelevant news items. The sad thing is this was indeed the news in Malaysia yesterday. Another day of  irrelevance. 
There is nothing of any economic value in the 10 news headlines above. It is actually a record of  time wasting, useless and non productive activity that goes on in the country.  Can you imagine the amount of wasted time behind these irrelevant headlines?
And I decided to comment about this because I have been noticing this not just over the past few days but for years now. Every day the country just floats along with the tide, just like floatsam, in Malay it is called hanyut.
Yesterday there is news that 27 US corporations are moving their manufacturing operations from China to one country - Indonesia. 27 American corporations are relocating their factories to Indonesia. Not even one is coming to Malaysia.
Over here our economy is projected to "shrink". By how much? Here is some arithmetic. Some say (government people) the economy may see a negative growth rate of -2.5%. So coming from a base of 4% GDP growth that means a shrinkage of -6.5% in the economy.
One foreign bank economist thinks the shrinkage will be -8.5%. So does that mean a shrinkage from say 4% to -4.5% ??
There is going to be a shrinkage in the economy. And there is going to be a lot of shrinkage.  
So what are we doing to reverse this shrinkage? 
Create more barriers, more restrictions, more difficulties in the economy?  "Jom kita menyusahkan manusia"  type of policies?
The reason why our economy is in so much trouble is exactly because of this.
We have handcuffed the economy for decades now.
The Corona Virus, the crash in commodity prices are just the final nails in the coffin. Tokpa says the unemployment will go up THREE TIMES. If the unemployment WAS 500,000 then it will hit 1.5 MILLION. I don't think these numbers are accurate. Since the Corona Virus the unemployment has skyrocketed. And do not forget to count the foreign workers who are unemployed.  
Because the unemployed "HUMAN BEINGS" in the economy reflect on how much of the economy is shutting down.  So please do include the UNEMPLOYED FOREIGN WORKERS in the headcount of the unemployed. 
The economy is not going to come back. More of our "local" graduate engineers are going to be sweeping the roads (like that engineer boy in Penang) or they are going to go into janitorial cleaning services. Even then they will become unemployed.
I just hope they do not turn to doing bad things. Posted by Syed Akbar Ali 

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