Presidential Elec 2023
How much is our national reserves?
A few people asked me, if I were the president, if I would tell them how much is our total reserves and why it would take 52 man years to determine this amount.
I wish to address these questions.
The reserves comprise of two components:
- physical assets, i.e. land and building owned by the government
- financial assets, i.e .the money held by the sovereign funds (Temasek, GIC and MAS).
Former President Ong Teng Cheong asked for a list of physical assets, i.e. buildings and land, owned by the government to be expressed in dollar value. The Accountant General told him that it would take 52 man years to do a complete valuation of the assets. More details can be found here.
These assets are already expressed in their book value. I believe that there is no point in taking the large effort to recompute the assets to their current value. I do not see any value in recomputing the value of these physical assets, as there is no plan to liquidate them.
On the financial assets held by the three sovereign funds, the total value would probably be more than $1 trillion.
As at 31 March 2022, the amount held by MAS, Temasek and GIC was $514 billion, $403 billion and "way over US$100 billion" respectively.
The government said that they do not wish to disclose the exact figure.as it might encourage speculators to attack on the Singapore currency. I do not agree with this reasoning, but I do not wish to argue over this matter.
I think that it does not really matter whether the financial assets is worth $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion?
It is more important to address the following questions:
- Do we have adequate reserves for future needs?
- Are we keeping too much money in our reserves, when the money could be used to reduce the cost of living or create jobs for the people?
- Do we have to increase taxes and GST, so that more money can go into the reserves?
These are decisions that have to be made by the president and the government, with advice from the economist and financial experts.
These decisions are beyond the comprehension of ordinary citizens. These citizens should trust the decisions taken by the leaders and should not presume that they are smarter than the leaders.
The leaders should explain the decisions in a way that can be understood and preferably accepted by the people, or at least a large majority of the people. There is no need to hide the facts, leading to suspicion of lack of transparency.
Tan Kin Lian
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What he means is we are agree to disagree on whether disclosure is beneficial or not
Let's focus on adequacy of reserves
Set some principles eg 5x GDP
Then if there is excess spend to help the poor and needy
Don't save for the sake of saving
CM fan 23 Aug 2023
Soooo... you disagree with why the government should not disclose the reserves, but you say we should trust the government on these? Could you please elaborate? Because you do sound really confused.
TheDudeAbides 20 Aug 2023