Foggy Greetings

Foggy greetings on the last day of 2008 early in the morning. Foggy about the future, but staying hopeful that eventually there will be clearer skies.

The future is also foggy because leaders with flagging courage have been telling lies that all would be well and the fundamentals are strong. Fortunately for me, I never believed them. I thank God for putting me with previously the right jobs and experience, the good friends to know. I feel sorry for those who have been misled into the wrong investments, who had trusted others who claimed they could see through the fog who are actually themselves clueless.

The fog will eventually lifts not because we make it so. It is only natural that it clears but we will have no lack of personalities to claim credit for it. If you think hindsight is 20/20 vision you are mistaken. Just look at one of those historical events that we have tried to attempt an honest study - The Great Depression and you will see how controversial it is. Professional historians know we cannot see history with clarity, how often facts are disputed, what more the hows, whats and whys. But we also cannot do without them, a broken compass is still a compass. We are humans.

We cannot agree on the past, the present passes too quickly, as like the fog I drove through this morning and the future is even murkier. So plans are for education and prayer, the expression of our hope and faith, and the future is engaged with courage and character than with brains. Brains is only good for the now, like choosing healthy over bad food, preferring to save than to waste on unnecessary spending...

See http://www.inspiringword.net/daily/all-dailies.php?day_is=1231 then.

Happy New Year!

Water is precious in the Desert

You can tell from this photo that I have bought far too many packs of water. Back home you get your water from the tap, boil it and if you prefer it cold pour it into a tumbler to be placed in a fridge. Here everyone buys water, and I have inadvertantly developed a habit of buying too much. Each time I push a trolley in a supermart, I feel that I must carry back some water. I think I should just quit this and start ordering them to be delivered in 5-gallons bottles.

There is a brand of bottled water that sometimes taste like our new water back home. To avoid being sued, I am not mentioning their name here. Also my Canadian friend daughter works for them.

We have experimented with several brands and have settled for Masafi, which I am told is the choice of the Emiratis. We have to avoid Evian, Volvic and Perrier. They have set a far too high standards for price. Ideally you should only pay so much for water without even knowing how much it costs, otherwise you would eventually count the number of times you go to the toilet too right?

Collapsing Real Estate

The above came from my more technical blog on NaviMap (http://navimap.blogspot.com/2006/05/dubai-real-estate-bubble.html)

I visited Dubai in May '06. Upon returning to Singapore I drew the above NaviMap. So much has changed in two years.

Even as the prices of high end property is nose diving, the rental market remains relatively resilient. We paid 190K AED in in a single cheque for a year rental. Yes, for the uninitiated you are reading it right - One year's rental paid in advance. Stupid market. Last time, I checked Dubizzle, apartments like ours are still going for between 200 to 210K AED. This is a little better than when some landlords were asking for 220K AED and occasionally even 230K AED a few weeks earlier. The day of reckoning of the rental sector could be coming.

The market here is quite opaque, otherwise I feel prices would have responded faster. I wonder if they have not set themselves up for a fall over the cliff as a result. And as this happen to real estate, it should also apply to cars too, and an eminently depreciating asset to boot. We have decided to stay with pricey car rental (3.5K/month) for now.

There will be collateral damage of course - Lots of people will be laid off. We don't know if we will eventually join their swelling ranks, but I am sure except God nobody knows. So as confidence evaporates given that the crazy and greedy behavior of the past few years get exposed, commerce is braking towards a grinding halt. Once locked, the grease of liquidity has not been sufficient to remove the friction. It is because the road ahead on the old paradigm isn't tenable any more. As and when the path is secure again, governments and central bankers will discover there is too much liquidity. Some worry that it might take a war to make this happen. They pointed out that despite FDR valiant effort, he couldn't get America out of its economic malaise. It took World War II to do it. I don't know, this is too difficult for me to figure out. I just hope we are not entering a dark age. I haven't met anyone who can point the way to a new dawn yet but that does not mean there isn't one. My grand father generation will tell you that they felt the world ended when the Japs took Singapore. They could not be more wrong.

Conclusion: The future is beyond us to fathom, but let's have faith. If this is not good enough for you, go and read Taleb's, "The Black Swan" and get a good dose of intellectual humility.

"Ghim Moh" market

Don't you think this look like a wet market in Singapore and Ghim Moh's in particular. This is the wholesale cum retail Fruit and Vegetable Market near the driving school.

I spent some time there to watch some people come in pick ups to buy lots of vegetables, probably their daily supply for their food business. The bid-offer start off at 50%.

For small families like ours, it isn't worth making the long trip here. The quantities we need are small and it is a long way from our place - Almost like going from Queenstown to Changi Airport.

Car shopping

Visited several car showrooms yesterday. To go straight to the end, our conclusion is still the car we are driving now - the 2009 Honda Accord is best. We checked out the Toyota Camry with high expectations given the solid reviews it has received but feel that the accolades should have gone to its predecessor. This new model is very cramped at the back seats and the children didn't like it.

We were roundly impressed with the tiny Honda Jazz. It is a marvel in engineering and design but feeling it is not adequate on the safety aspect, we decide to pass.

Cars here are a world cheaper than back home. An entry level Accord will only set you back 83K AED or about S$33K. We can well afford to pay cash for it. Even back home we have always not taken a car loan unless it costs more to pay in cash. Yes, this is a stranger and stranger world isn't it? Your finance and economics texts would tell you that you always pay more taking on a loan. I can't go into the details here, but the concept is quite simple. In an integrating world, and don't we already try to teach our kids in school to think integratively across disciplines, there are full of surprises. That is why the financial markets have also become so confusing. The economics we have been taught were never sufficiently integrated with other disciplines to mentally prepare us for market surprises.

Back to car shopping. The Toyota showrooms while not crowded were receiving enough visitors to keep many of their sales executives occupied. Looks like the biggest wave of the financial tsunami is still on the way. We kicked the tires of many models - I mean it only figuratively before a sales person approached us.

At the Nissan showroom, the salesman lost interest and literally disappeared when he found out where were from. It didn't matter actually. He didn't know we will pay cash. Too bad. Perhaps most Nissan buyers take out car loans.

As to why we are not keen on SUVs, well for the same reasons Freakonomics repeatedly explains why people always do not make the best choices.

Christmas Gathering

We were invited to a neighbour's apartment for dinner last night. Yummy korean barbecue. Everything was excellent, and I especially like the bee-hoon and beef. I experimented with the lamb but as feared, it was less successful for me.

Christmas is not celebrated in the UAE. So the only thing that make me bill this as a Christmas makan was because we had bought presents for the children.

Back home, without fail for almost 20 years now, the same old friends will meet for a simple dinner and chit chat until the early hours of the morning. The children will be at the basement of the house having their greatest fun of the year. So you can understand how sad our girls were to live Christmas here as just another work day.

Well, at least we make some calls home to our old friends with our speaker phone on the 24th.

How big is big?

How big is the aquarium at the Dubai Mall. This is big (see above) but not bigger and less crowded than the one we visited in Monterey, California, which is considered among the top three in the world.