The Economist - Public debt: US$70k per Singaporean? The real Hard Truth

[Confuseous]

How much reserves?
Since the total reserves of Singapore is not known, what is the total reserves less the public debt?

As the key reason for establishing the office of the Presidency was to guard the reserves, perhaps these questions may be answered in the future.

Central Provident Fund
As the bulk of our public debt is due to issuing non-marketable government bonds to the Central Provident Fund (CPF) Board, in exchange for CPF funds at the interest rates paid for the various CPF account types, Singapore may actually be in a very strong financial situation, as we hardly have any external debt.

However, the public debt may be problematic, if we decide to pay higher rates of interest on CPF funds, such as Malaysia’s Employee Provident Fund (EPF) which pays actual returns of the fund every year, or if we decide to allow CPF withdrawals at earlier ages, or lower CPF Minimum Sums withheld until age 65 and beyond

http://theonlinecitizen.com/2011/09/public-debt-us70k-per-singaporean/

 

[omnia1]

As I have posted in another thread, we may not know the total reserves that Singapore has, but we do know that our reserves exceed our public/national debt (whatever we want to call it). We know that:

1. Singapore's reserves with MAS amounted to US$242 billion as at June 2011 (check MAS' website and that of the IMF).
2. The investment portfolio of Temasek Holdings was valued at S$193 billion (or about US$161 billion) as at March 2011 as audited by KPMG (see Temasek's website and annual report).
3. Only the investments of GIC are not publicly disclosed although many estimate GIC's holdings to be well above US$100 billion.​

Adding all of this (even if we assume a conservative US$100b for GIC), we see that Singapore's reserves way exceed its public/national debt !

The Online Citizen was honest enough to write, "As the bulk of our public debt is due to issuing non-marketable government bonds to the Central Provident Fund (CPF) Board, in exchange for CPF funds at the interest rates paid for the various CPF account types, Singapore may actually be in a very strong financial situation, as we hardly have any external debt." (emphasis added)

And they are correct on this point. Which also means that the sensational headline of "Public debt: US$70k per Singaporean?" is potentially misleading. A large chunk of that supposed US$70k debt per person is what the Singaporean owes himself because of CPF. Meaning that the public debt is not as scary as it looks. And once we factor in Singapore's reserves, oh boy. From a US$70K public debt per person, you now have a large surplus per person (after netting off all debts) ! ... lol

 

[Cruxx]

Public debt, private reserves.

 

[da dick]

too bad the pappies will try to "safeguard" that 100 billion FOREVER.