May 17, 2010 World no longer the same
By Francis Chan
'We are not in the same place that we were before the crisis. There's a structural shift taking place in the world economy,' said Mr Tharman in a panel discussion on Fareed Zakaria GPS, a CNN programme that aired yesterday. -- ST PHOTO: ARTHUR LEE CH
THE global economy may be on the mend, but the world will no longer be the same as before the crisis, said Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam yesterday. Western economies will see major adjustments to consumer spending and saving, and debt-ridden governments will also have to work hard to balance their books.
'We are not in the same place that we were before the crisis. There's a structural shift taking place in the world economy,' said Mr Tharman in a panel discussion on Fareed Zakaria GPS, a CNN programme that aired yesterday. This means that Asia will have to pick up the slack, but building up Asian consumers' confidence to make up for the lower demand will also take time, added the minister.
That is why the world will have to expect growth to be slower overall for the next five to eight years, he said. Mr Tharman was part of a panel discussion that included French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, head of the White House Economic Council Lawrence Summers, and International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Read the full story in Monday's edition of The Straits Times.
Legal charge and conviction While serving as economics director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore in 1993, Tharman was charged under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) in a case involving the release of Singapore's 1992 second-quarter flash projections to a research director, Mr Raymond Foo, and economist Manu Bhaskaran, of Crosby Securities, and to journalists Kenneth James and Patrick Daniel of the Business Times.[4]
The OSA case, which stretched over more than a year, was reported extensively in the Singapore press. Tharman contested and was eventually acquitted of the charge of communicating the GDP growth flash projections. Senior District Judge Richard Magnus then introduced a lesser charge of negligence, because the prosecution's case was that the figures were seen on a document that he had with him at a meeting with the private economists which he had attended with one of his colleagues. Tharman contested this lesser charge too, and took to the witness stand for a few days.
The court nevertheless convicted him together with all the others in the case, including the editor of Business Times newspaper which published the figures. Tharman was fined S$1,500, and the others S$2,000. As there was no finding that he knowingly communicated any classified information, the case did not pose any hurdle to his subsequent appointment as the Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
