There is a common say that two kinds of people deserve to go to hell after they are dead:
1. The Bankers
2. The Lawyer

I think this is especially truth in Singapore. Most importantly, you can find this 2 trade of people inside our Ruling party. Coincidence? Maybe ……

Para 1. How many of you have signed something….like an insurance contract without reading it first?

Para 2. I am in the opinion that if a company or financial instituition wants to promote their products by educating their customers, they will have do much better than articles!
WHY? Cos many people hate reading! Pass them a prospectus, and they will bring it home unread till may be a few months later (or may be never even read it!)

3. Even a face-to-face meeting to answer some questions would be difficult because not every question can be explained in a way that investors can understand.
As such another person will have to tackle the question so as not to hold up the Q and A.

4. “Surrender” and “Withdraw” may mean the same thing but to some investors they don’t know. Have a glossary of the most commonly used “investing” terms first. And that means INVESTORS MUST LEARN TO LOVE READING! Learn to love learning!

Before that, work with the newspapers here to write some articles, and promote the upcoming talks. That not only begins to give the public an idea of the products, it allows them to prepare to ask questions. It is a win-win situation for all. Educate the public, promotes the product.

I say PAP also means “Poor also Pay”…..

But the big difference here is that the terms, conditions descriptions are all written by lawyers or at least vetted by legal department before putting out to the public. Unfortunately the people selling the products are not lawyers themselves. So cannot really explain the entire contract in layman term to the consumer. So is it the fault of the salesman? You be the judge.

But when anything happen, the salesman will most probably set aside and get the legal people to tell you that the contract does not cover this at that b’cos blah blah blah according to the legal language in the contract. So do you think it is fair to the consumer that when the company wants to sell the product, they get the salesman to give you the sales talk. But when you want to make a claim, they get the lawyers to tell you this cannot that cannot… Why can’t the salesman follow the case through? The excuse given is that sales people are not lawyers so that cannot tell you why is that and this. Hahaha..

So is the law set up to protect the rich? You be the judge again. Singapore is a place where we talk about justice. Our ministers swear by this system and use this system effectively too.

This is SINGAPORE.

NONE. The closest you will get is that everything as trackable as possible – purchase orders can be traced back to other documents, invoices, receipts, etc. Staff can be tracked via NRIC # alone, or a combination like by family name and nationality. Everything as trackable and as accountable as possible. That system is known as the once-overhyped ISO systems.

Everytime i visit this thread i get a fright – worse if it’s night time.
can change or not?

Agree with you.
The system is such that businesses have the money power to engage great lawyers and contract specialists to craft a nice contract that can protect the businessmen such that when a naive consumer signs the dotted line, after ‘creative’ selling tactics is used by salesmen, they have actually signed to sell their soul, so-to-speak.

Believe me, there could be another round of Fiasco sometime later unless there is a Union for Consumers to make changes to the way business is done. There should be a way to ensure that contracts must be clear and easy to understand by all targeted consumers. Else, its simply unfair as salesmen can use tactics to make naive people sign a contract containing clauses not good for them. Its called business ETHICS. Which system ensures business is done ETHICALLY?

Its is understandable that banks do what they do is for only one thing. Profit. But selling these products to their own deposirors not only causes a conflict of interest but confidence and monetary losses to their own depositors.

But of course this would be impossible seeing how profit driven these banks are.

Then they should seperate the banking and investment/sales entities altogether. Do not place them under the same roof where the depositors go to do bank transactions. HOUSE THESE PEOPLE IN ANOTHER BUILDING OR OFFICE OR WHATEVER. As long as they are unable to physically targets their so called “fishes”. Do not place them at the branches.

If a customer wants to invest their money. They will go to them. Not the other way round. Bank tellers at the counters should just do what is required to process a customer’s transaction. Not drop comments whether subtle or not saying their money could earn more if you invest in this or that. Its just a cheap way of using psychology on them.

Key words like capital protection, gurantee, higher yield are just some of the words these RMs or FAs use to pique our interest. After that is achieved, only good points are mentioned, risks involed tend to be glossed over, Financial jargon changes so frequently that even experienced individuals find it hard to keep up.

Their main objective is to make the sale. Not care for your well being. This is a critical point we have to remember. After they got your signature on that dotted line. You are no longer of any use or concern to them. Their main concern is the next fish to fry. Unless you got more cash of course. Sad to say, this is the reality of it all, regardless of how these people try to defend themselves.

Propectuses should be translated into a simpler form where an ordinary person understands. This way, there should be no cause for misrepresentation.

MAS must moniter all such products sold by these banks. Initiative has to be taken. Not wait and see then follow what other countries do. From what I’ve seen Singapore has been doing alot of that recently.

U r right, totally lost touch since gct days. And like to talk down on people, i scholar so smarter, who r u? u know what? I’m worried for them. BTW, i hv not vote for a long time, everywhere is grc, u didn’t notice? The next ge, i can beg even more, every one with one super old bird minister as anchor man, like usa olypmic swimming team with michael phelps.

I have never regarded them savvy investors in financial products compared to those I have listed. The institutions I listed existed long before them yet they too failed in many cases and big time. So what to expect from a group of interns turned “professionals” who get their advice from other employed $$$$$$$$ “professionals”.

In hindsight, it is easy to make all the right moves and assess the risk. Let’s hope the lessons are learned albeit this is at a very high cost (I learned mine back in 1982). However, we humans are strange animals. We tend to forget our wounds from time to time. Don’t we? Did the 1985 recession, 1997 financial crisis, 2001 stock market crisis, 2003 SARs incident makes us more diligent?

This may sound cynical, I like to ask did those investors (risk known or unknown, mislead, savvy, not savvy) make their investments decision if they have read the advise of W. Buffet in his 2002 annual report about derivatives trading and take it to heart or the recent May 2007 OECD report (see link below)

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/49/45/39354012.pdf

Or, should some good Samaritans be as diligent as financial market watch dog are being aware of this and sounded the early warnings? You think then when the global economy is in such a high, people will heed these warnings? Of course this is in hindsight again. I just took a few minutes to search through the web to find out whether there were adequate warnings out in the market by credible organizations or personality and understand conceptually what derivatives trade is all about. And lo and behold I found two of the many credible early warning reports. Those banks has got to know this right? Did they warn those investors (if and if they knew they were investing in derivatives?) If my early years in investing had taught me anything is to stay clear of things or products that I have zero knowledge or absolutely not clear of what I am getting myself into.

As sympathetic I am to those (some are my HK friends too as I have found out) who are truly being mislead and hope they should get something back, better if they can at least get back 80 percent if not their entire invested sum ~ it is going to be a very ugly fight. I don’t believe any mandate will solve the issues in this case without a tough battle. MAS is not god in this case likewise HKMA in Hong Kong. The biggest culprit in this case is Lehman and those Regulators in USA. And you know what, the biggest winners at the end of the day, those Law firms. I believe there will be a host of litigations within months if no acceptable resolution is in place. Unfortunately, I believe there will be no quick fix for this debacle.

Adding salt to the wounds, with the recession beginning to take hold GLOBALLY, it is even going to be a harder time ahead for every body not just the affected investors. I am interested to know how the government is going to help the citizenry weather through this recession that may last till end of 2009 or further (there are still a lot of unknown black holes in the Financial Market such as the trillion CDS). The least they can do is to contain or curb the unnecessary price hike on the basic necessities and at the same time hopefully they listen to my early plea to allow every Singaporean to early withdrawal of our CPF money for a cap of 25K over a 3 year period to help ease the cash strapped citizenry who may be out of work because of retrenchment or other reasons. This is not too much to ask for (right?) from those “Disciplined and Hard working people who built all this”. Sound familiar? It is the reply from MM to VB.

You forget the greatest and smartest investment experts of all, Temasek Holding and GIC ! They must be the smartest since they investing billion dollars, which some borne out of CPF , reserves , and smart to hide under secrecy and rationality (Impact of loss and win cannot tell, how much writeoff already done ?).
Fancy old fart telling that it may takes 30 years before investment harvest, that alone is the greatest Investment wisdom !

Our government is the greatest gambler of all. They already lost billion dollars of gamble even before the gambling business of IR start. Worse, it look like they are addicted and still want to invest some more without recouping their loss first (Anyway, will they care, it is not even their loss and not their own pocket money).
Just a addicted gambler who lost big sum of money that have to be accountable some day, the gambler has no choice but to continue to gamble in the hope to regain his previous loss, otherwise the last resort is to jump down the MRT due to inability to pay back the loss even in his lifetime.

Look, addicted gambler never learn lesson.
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_292713.html

Hope that online citizen write article on Whether Temasek Holding is a addicted gambler. The reason I find that Temask give to continue to invest during this bad time, even with respect to obscene and lackluster performance of investment over last years, is no different from addicted gambler. Gambling is about luck, and if one is highly skilled, one can still cheat in gambling casino, but in investment one can’t cheat the market force and reality.

How is gambling related to these lehman saga and FI ?
Due to the way MAS’ heckcare attitude and FI given so much free way to come more creatively sophisticated product with superb marketing and rhetoric, the investors have unconciously has become a gambler themselves, that is to gamble whether to put their stake into the bank’s product even though bank’s reputation is good.

No doubt to me, nowsady investment is synonmous to gambling.