Singapore Boleh!

I spent my Saturday morning at work listening to a talk by Nicky Tan about his lessons learnt during his investigation into the collapse of Barings Bank back in 1995. For those of you who can't remember, Barings Bank was the oldest private bank in England at the time, but it was brought down "single-handedly" by a rogue trader, Nick Leeson, who was based in Singapore. Leeson made an astounding number of bad bets on futures contracts, and in so doing lost $1.4 billion on behalf of the bank, even though he was actually not allowed to do any prop trading. Meanwhile, the bank's management was supposedly oblivious to what was happening and kept on borrowing money to fund Leeson's trades, thinking that the trades were being done on behalf of their clients.

While some of the risk management lessons that Nicky Tan pointed out were certainly pertinent to the work that MAS does, probably my #1 take-home of the day was his advice to us as Singaporeans not to think too lowly of ourselves. At the time, the Bank of England was all out to drag Singapore's name through the mud and place the blame for Barings' collapse entirely on the shoulders of the Singapore regulators. Nicky Tan and his partner, Sundaresh Menon, both who were only in their early thirties at the time, managed to produce a report that was internationally recognised to be of better quality than that produced by the Bank of England's investigators and effectively helped to keep Singapore's reputation intact.

He went on to tell us about how he managed to beat Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse in carrying out a $15b restructuring all on the strength of a team of Singaporeans. While there may be an element of bragging in there, the point still stands that we really have to curb our 妄自菲薄 attitude and start believing in our God-given talents and abilities. We often get intimidated by people who speak better or dress better than us, but by adopting the typical Asian attitude of keeping quiet in class for example, half the battle is already lost.