Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Andrew Sheng: Is West Still Best?

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Did the world miss the important lessons from the previous Global Financial Crises? Is it the time for ASEAN to challenge the irrelevant pre-existing systems? Andrew Sheng’s retrospective view on the 1998 and 2008 crises, and what lesson learns for preparing for the next recession. In this talk, he also offers a hopeful perspective on the future of ASEAN’s economy and generations. Moreover, he brings a new insight on how decentralized information technology will benefit the nature and, at the same time, help incentivized people who has been actively protecting it. Andrew Sheng is a former central banker and financial regulator, currently distinguished fellow at the Asia Global Institute, University of Hong Kong. He writes mostly about Asian perspectives on global issues. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #AndrewSheng ------------------------ Episode notes: https://endgame.id/eps104notes Pre-Order merchandise resmi Endgame: https://wa.me/628119182045 Berminat menjadi pemimpin visioner berikutnya? Hubungi SGPP Indonesia di: admissions.sgpp.ac.id [e-mail] https://wa.me/628111522504 Playlist episode "Endgame" lainnya: https://endgame.id/season2 https://endgame.id/season1 https://endgame.id/thetake  Kunjungi dan subscribe:  @SGPP Indonesia   @Visinema Pictures 

We're in the completely financialized world, but it's not just a financialized world. The finance became digitized. So finance is a network. Finance is information. So what we have is a hologram of the other. And the trouble is that that holograms is created by elites. And the elites do not forget the masses, the 1% forget. get the 99%, that's when the empires fall.

This is Endgame. Hello, we're here, we're coming Andrew Scheng, but he also, he also has been in bank-negara, and also as as a pemmipin, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission. Hi, Andrew, thank you so much for coming on to our show.

Thank you very much, Pat Gita. You know, you... Call me, Gita. call me, pa. Andrew, Andrew, tell us about your early childhood. You're born in Sabah, and for some reason you got stuck in the UK, studied, and all the way to central banking and all the way to being a regulator and all the way to writing books and all that good stuff. Please, tell us. Yeah, well, I grew up in Sabah and studied there, but my father was a very big influence. influence on me. And Saba was very special because, you know, at that time, it was very small. It's a completely diverse community. Lots of nature.

My biggest impression growing up was sitting with my father on the terrace outside our house in Likas, what is today, Kota Kinabalu. It used to be called Jesselton and watching the Milky Way, you know. and talked about philosophy, history, etc., etc. So, you know, reflecting back, it kind of gave me the kind of a big picture view of life rather than just focusing on the micro. I studied in Sabah College and then I went to England to study. In those days, my generation mostly went to England. those who got scholarships, went to Australia and Canada.

Those who went to Australia and Canada hardly ever came back. Those from England always came back. Those to America, half came back, half stayed. So it's interesting times of my generation. I went to join Banga Gara, the Central Bank and rose in the ranks. And then in 89, the World Bank invited me to do a study on bank failure and restructuring throughout the world.

Malaysia went through a fascinating period of shock. After the Volker shock, actually, thinking back now, it was part of the Volker shock. Interest rates went very high, companies went over-borrowed, we had to tighten, and then the shock went through the system. And then the first deposit cooperatives fail.

I was then the advisor, what was the equivalent of the assistant governor today, in charge of bank regulation. And the governor told me to clean up the banking system. So I prepared for the shock of the economy on the banking system, but it was the deposit cooperatives, which was regulated by the agriculture department that failed first. And it taught me a lot about bank failure.

And, you know, of course, after these fail, the shocks were on the finance companies in Malaysia and then on some of the smaller banks and so we had to clean up all this and I was so tired after that so when the World Bank invited me to do some research on failed banks it was really eye-opening

because wherever I went around the world the same conditionings were happening you know banks were failing so I wrote the book on that subject or rather wrote most of it, but edited 8K studies, which was very helpful for developing markets on how to deal with financial crisis. And then I went to Hong Kong as Deputy Chief Executive

of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority under Joseph V.M., because it was an opportunity to be there between the 93 to 205. that during that period when, you know, Hong Kong was returning back to China. So it was a historic moment. So we lived through the Asian financial crisis. At that time, I was the deputy governor in charge of the liaison with the whole of the East Asian all the way from Japan, you know, down to Thailand, Indonesia. That's how I got to know. But I got to know most of my central banking friends in ASEAN through my days

in Bangalegara. So the network was extremely useful. And then when I saw the kind of Western media and academics, you know, blaming the victims and saying, you know, you are the, you know, victims and therefore it was all your mistake. And I said it can be. You know, the year before, they gave a clean bill of health to Indonesia, Malaysia, and even South Korea. And in Thailand, And they said, well, you had a little bit of problems with exchange rate. Boom, you know, one by one. It was like a domino effect, chain reaction. So I wrote the book in 2009.

I wrote most of it during my spare time. Every Christmas I would go to Bali, sit down and write. And that was my book, which Cambridge University Press published. And it basically said this is a network crisis. in which, of course, you know, East Asia was the global Asian supply chain, just like, you know, Germany was the head of the European supply chain to supply America. Japan was the head of the Asian supply chain, and we were basically dollar-based. And a lot of people got rich, and then it went to their head.

They over-borrowed in dollars. And when the yen started being volatile against the dollar, and the Japanese economy got into trouble, the Japanese bank pulled back all their dollar lending, and the rest of Asia had a heart attack. That was essentially what it was. And in the dollar-based network, all you need was the U.S. to release the lender of last resort facilities, but the U.S. refused to do so. Until they realized that South Korea, which was really not that badly in debt, also got the contagion. and after and the US did this because they had troops in in South Korea and so it became a geopolitical issue

I mean they they they as you know they did not lend to Indonesia without very stringent conditions right also lending to Thailand with very stringent conditions so the Asia financial crisis had a big shock on the region and I wanted to tell the story from our side of the the picture rather than, you know, you're the victim, you had bad politics, you had bad governance, therefore the trouble is yours. I said, hello, we were told we were healthy, and suddenly we had a heart attack, and next door also had a heart attack. So it's a little bit like COVID, right? I mean, it was, it was a, it was a, of course we did not take care of our health as well, but we were high on debt. And that's the other issue that, that the insight that I got from, that's why I,

the book is called from Asian to global financial crisis, because the whole issue was the financial system was dollar-based, and the democratic politics was not to raise taxes because the rich people won't allow, and then to spend a lot of money on welfare, which means that you always run a deficit. But if you are the advanced countries, the reserve currency countries, you can always print whatever you want because the rest of the world will use it because they use this as a reserve currency. So you have no fear of devaluation, you had no fear of capital outflows, and therefore you had very lax monetary and fiscal policies. And that's how the world went from debt from 100% of GDP in 1980 to today, 470% of GDP. for the whole world, right? And so this has become a debt-inflated world.

And secondly, why did climate change happen? Well, climate change happens because of excess human consumption. But how did you get excess human consumption? You can only excess consume if you have somebody's willing to borrow. So as long as you can borrow, you can exist tomorrow's resources. And therefore, we are consuming global. resources with what we thought were no consequences, except that we're killing biodiversity. We are destroying our environment by polluting the waters and the air.

And at the same time, we're creating massive inequality. Right. So when interest rates goes to zero, it's not the poor that gets the money at zero interest rate. Let's put it this way. It's the rich that gets this and negative interest rates. Yeah. Yeah, that's a vicious cycle that you've just drawn. I want to backtrack a bit.

I want to drill down on these points in terms of how, you know, this credit creation has been the devil and how it is likely to continue affecting the climate in a bad way. But backtrack to the point where how you compare 2008 v. of E 97-98, right? And I know for a fact that, you know, we looked like we were the guilty ones, you know, in Asia, when, in fact, you know, other people were also guilty from the developed economies. And how from a policy standpoint you saw things that were a bit hypocritical, you know, in terms of what they told us to do in 98, vis-a-vis what they did not do in 2008?

Well, you know, the crisis in Asia, the Asian financial crisis and the GFC, the global financial crisis, which really was a North Atlantic crisis, rather than the world crisis, but of course they were the biggest reserve currency areas, was identical, in the sense it was a, basically a near-fix exchange rate problem, right?

We were not strictly pegged against the dollar. But we, because we're on the same supply chain, there was a very interesting times, right? The rupee was roughly 2,000 to the dollar. The bat was 25 to the dollar. Ringue was 2.5 to the dollar. The peso was around 25 to the dollar. And the Taiwan dollar was around also 25.

to the dollar. So, you know, 10 to 1, roughly speaking, and we're very stable because we're all using the dollar. In the European case, in 1999, they became one currency, right, one currency area without similar fiscal discipline, right? And so the serial borrowers, like the southern European countries, fudge their numbers. We all know this, right? they declared that they met the Maastricht maximum fiscal deficit at 3% of GDP, but below the line fiscal deficit was much, much worse than that. And so the result was that with a fixed exchange rate, the biggest lesson that I learned in Hong Kong, which had a currency pegged against the dollar, was that you cannot afford to have productivity lower

than the benchmark currency country. I agree. If you do that, you know, if the surplus countries are not willing to lend to you, you go for default. That was the discipline of the fixed exchange rate. And of course, in Europe, that's the same thing happened. Fix exchange rate, laxity in the fiscal side as well as banking side. Guess what?

In the Asian financial crisis, Japanese banks, American banks, local banks, over lent to Asian borrowers. Okay? Once they pull the credit, heart attack. In the European crisis, German banks, surplus banks, Netherlands banks, etc., etc., lend excessively to sovereign,

Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, etc., credit. Okay? And of course, when the, you know, the shocks came from the, subprime, it was all related because the European investment banks and fund managers borrowed in dollars, invested in subprime and other derivatives. Then when the subprime crash came through, they were short of dollars to me. So the result was, and then once that happened, it exposed

that these banks had a lot of exposure to the P.I. G.X. Pigs countries. the Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain, right? And so the result was the minute you try to tighten, these guys die exactly like what happened in Asia, right? You know, the minute you squeeze the tightening, and of course the European Central Bank was supposed to lend, but they had no one fiscal policy. You know, basically, Germany said,

look, I am not going to underwrite everybody, if I underwrite everybody, I will die, right? So the Germans learn from their experience because they said they did best, they adjusted the real economy to fit the euro. The others did not adjust, and you're expecting the Germans to bail out the German public says no way, right?

So the result was the only way thing that saved Europe was that because as a whole Europe is rich. Mario Draghi then said, I'll do whatever it takes. But actually legally and technically, whatever it takes is technically, is conceptually correct, legally technically not quite correct. But it doesn't matter. The market believed him and everything stabilized. Then the situation became how much the surplus countries were willing to help the poorer countries, the deficit countries.

The southern states, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that's where the similarities are. And to that extent, we have similarities because both Europe and Asia were basically supply chains to America. And if we, you know, and America's reflation in the global financial crisis, it was not the American reflection. It was the Chinese reflation, the famous 4 trillion renambi. stimulus package that turned out to be more than $40 trillion, more than 40, more than 10 times. In fact, more like 20 times, credit expansion in China, which then reflated the world because of

massive commodity price improvement. And then the world got out of the global financial crisis. But then the Chinese economy got imbalanced because of that. So which the Chinese now regret. And that's why in this crisis, the Chinese authorities are no longer going to try to reflect so bravely. They're going to be much more cautious because they went from last time. Well, I guess the simple structural difference between 08 and 98 would have been that, you know,

the developing economies in Asia were not able to refinancialize, whereas the developed economies had the upper hand because they had the reserve currency. so they could refinancialize as much as quickly as whatever, you know, they would have wanted. Let's drill down on this financialization, right? We've seen a massive financialization within or amongst the developed economies massively since 2008, more than what we have seen, you know, prior to 2008. Talk about what you've been talking about in your books and many of your lectures. about how that has translated into inequality

and how that needs to be fixed going forward? Well, you know, I was, this was by accident, but a film producer, you know, Ferguson, you know, I did this all this through email. He said, would you like to be interviewed for my documentary? This is on the inside job, right? That's right. With Matt Damon, the Oscar-winning movie. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, he, you know, the whole thing happened because he said, you know, I'm coming to Asia and I would like to interview you. I said, fine, just like what's happening between, you know, you and me in the end game, right? So I was busy. He said, I'm coming on this date. So I arranged to have a little courtyard where he interviewed me. And then he asked me questions exactly what you're doing. And I basically, it was a throwaway line for me. But I said, you know, look, why is it that financial engineers are paid, you know,

four to 100 times more than real engineers? Financial engineers build dreams, sell dreams, and the real engineer build real bridges. But if the real bridges collapse, the real engineers go to jail, and the financial engineers, you know, nothing happens to them. And they could turn out to be nightmares, the dreams. Absolutely. And they were, the financial engineer were creating what Warren Buffett called weapons of mass destruction, right? And they got away with it.

So the result was this massive inequality. Okay. There was no discipline. The real problem of financialization is what the, you know, the Hungarian economies, Coroni, called the Soviet system collapse because it had no hard budget constraint. Yeah. That means, you know, the Soviet government printed money, you know, the famous phrase was,

the Soviet government pretended to, so the Soviet people pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them. Okay. And today, you know, the same thing has happened with. liberal economies, right? You know, you pay them with more on pieces of paper. And so when you wanted the money back, they print another piece of paper to you. Okay?

And so this has happened not just by governments, it is now being done by private cyber currency people. They give you another promise that I can mine money, but actually I gave you a promise and in which there's nothing behind it, right? Yeah, yeah. So we're in the completely financialized world, but it's not just a financialized world. The finance became digitized. So finance is a network.

Finance is information. So what we have is a hologram of reality. And that hologram of reality is not reality. And the trouble is that that holograms is created by elites. And when the elites, do not forget the masses, the 1% forget the 99%. That's when the empires fall. That's when the governance get killed, right?

And that's what we're going through right now. The elites have forgotten about the masses. What I say, the West has forgotten the rest. Right? They think that their rule-based order is the best, right? The West is the best. and the best standards, best practice. And then we look at them and say,

hello, aren't you having all the problems that you complain of us having? Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so the global financial crisis was cancer for the West because the system was corrupt

and disrupted by financialization. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. And then they tried to impose that cancer medicine on the rest of the world in what is called Basel 3. And then at the first sign of the pandemic, they postponed Basel 3.

And so I asked my fellow regulators throughout Asia, I said, you wasted 12 years of your time preparing for the crisis. At the first sign of trouble, that medicine is postponed. Not necessary, right? Kicking the can down the road. Yeah, you kick the can down the road. And so why are we in the emerging markets eating cancer medicine, when our problem is dengue, a malaria. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. We need to fix our basic credit risks, which is very basic, not this very sophisticated, how do I manage very sophisticated derivatives. Okay? So it's a real issue that, you know, the West has problems dealing with at this point. So we live in an era where there has been tremendous. tremendously low interest rate environment for a long time. That's right.

By way of which the developed economies have been taken advantage of that to basically allow the elites to borrow at a much greater extent with much greater velocity than the non-elites, as a result of which there has been greater inequality between the development. and the developing and within the developed between the elites at the top and the non-elites at the bottom, right? And you've alluded to this many times in your speeches and lectures in that the developed economies have been able to borrow from the emerging economies, which have unfortunately or fortunately been blessed with higher or if not much higher savings rate, right? So if we were to want to fix this inequality, we could do many things, right? One, we have to make sure that, you know, there's less degree of financialization.

And if you were to financialize, you make sure that there's proper redistribution of wealth all the way from the top to the bottom or all the way from the bottom to the top. And you have mentioned that, you know, now that there is a correction to the low interest rate environment, that things are ticking up again, right? Is there a better hope now for seeing less financialization and seeing less inequality using your argument? Well, you see, life has always been unequal, right? Yeah.

You all know this. You know, the French philosopher said, you know, man is born in free, but everywhere he is in chains. And today's we are either in supply chain or we are blockchains, right? You know, that's the reality. Yeah. Well, we are tied the minute we are born.

You know, we all get an oblique court cut, and then we have to live. But the baby needs, the mother needs the parents. Right. And there's a period of nurture, right? Nurture in which, you know, we do. But there is always risk, right? The issue, I just share this insight with you. I was very fortunate.

I was invited to go to Dunhuan, which is the end of the Silk Road, you know, in China. And, you know, if you look west, you know, towards the, you know, Europe and the Middle East, it's a thousand miles of desert. If you look east still, there will be at least another few hundred, you know, a thousand miles of desert before you get to Beijing and the prosperous areas the other way around. what, standing at the desert, I'm looking at the camels. I asked myself, could conventional finance these caravans? Yeah, I know. I saw that. I saw that. No collateral. There's no way you can collateral. There is absolute governance, because if you don't trust the caravan people, they will steal you blind, they will get robbed blind, they will get lost in the desert. So the caravan is equivalent of today's unicorn.

One in maybe, you know, a 20-30. 100 or a thousand or whatever. You actually succeed, right? Yeah. And if they succeed, they bring the cargo back. You are, you are wealthy beyond your means. And so therefore, to a large extent, it is about risk. Correct.

But risk can only be managed by trust. And that's exactly Islamic finance. Because it's equity-based. And when interest rate went to zero, I told all my Muslim friends, I said, this is Islamic finance. Right? Right. When interest rate is all zero, as long as you actually do the ethical thing according to Jaria, you know, and I'm not a Muslim, but I recognize that's what, you know, Islamic finance is about ethics and it's about risk, right? It's about risk.

It's about risk sharing. It's not about risk transfer. You know, debt finance is transfer the risk all to the borrower. You know, you muddy, you know, your problem, you know, you don't. I mean, I get my money back, right? So the issue now is that the way of the future has to be capital. Right. Look at the last year's data.

Last year, the debt finance was something 33 times, the amount of equity raised, okay, in global public markets. And that's amazing, right? That's amazing. Now, if the flow is so skewed towards debt, that means all the borrowers are getting more and more leveraged. And that means the system is getting more and more fragile, right? And so are you surprised that when the debt system fails,

the central bank has to come in and buy up all the debt. that they can and transfer it onto their balance sheet. But who ultimately owns the debt of the balance sheet is the right yard, right? It's the people. Okay. So in fact, you're transferring the debt from the left hand to the right hand. And you say, oh, everything's okay. But it's not okay.

Because structurally, how can left hand of an old man like me rescue my right hand? It cannot be done. Yeah. I can only solve this out if I consume less. Right. I harm less the environment. And when I pass on, you know, my it will be ashes to ashes, right? Right, right.

You know, I hope my ashes will benefit the earth. Right. I mean, that's all that, you know, we really should be caring about. But the present system of financialization increases the fragility. Excruity, exclusivity, increases, you know, turbocharges, unfairness, and worsens the environment. And that is something we need to change. I agree with you. I'm with you in that financialization entails fragilization.

That's right. Of the economic structures, even societal structures, right? And we're sitting here being stared at by so. much liquidity, and I fail to understand why so much of that liquidity is being geared into fixed-income instruments, as opposed to equity instruments. And your caravan metaphor, I think it's a perfect example of how people in the past were willing to take an equity risk as opposed to a fixed-income risk. So my question to you is, how do we get people, government, cultures, societies, to take on more risks, to take on more equity risks, as opposed to a fixed income

story, or fixed income risks. And I think that's a structural challenge going forward, right? It would not be relevant of a question or a challenge if there's no liquidity. But right now there's so much liquidity in the market. If you take look at the M2, globally speaking, it's way in excess of $100 trillion. We got to do something about tweaking that. to more of the fixed income risk-taking, you know, capabilities? Well, let me make this a very simple story.

Right. You know, Keita, your website is all about storytelling. And I came to realize that if I tell it in very complicated models, very technical terms, people don't get it. Right. But the story is really about, asset allocation and risks. Okay?

So think about, you know, all of us as a family, right? The father, you know, the father or the mother, it doesn't really matter. He's head of the family, is very rich. And he has three choices. He can put the money with a bank, which means that the richest guy in the village or the city, etc., and he will get very low return on it. Okay? Right?

he can also give the property all the property to the children and hope that the children will grow the wealth for future generations okay but there is always a risk that the son or the daughter may spend it all okay we all know this very very sad story so the that's why people put some money with the banks and some money with the children okay the other third choice is to give to the neighbor, the talented young person, the man or the woman, who is very good in business, who is very smart, and you put the money with them, and then if they make a lot of money, you get richer, right? But you have a danger of losing it. And that's why if it is a very brilliant young man or young woman, you actually marry your son or daughter to them,

and you become family, right? Okay. So what has happened is that in the reality, we do in asset allocation, we do it one-third, one-third, one-third, right? We put one-third liquidity with the bank, earn very low interest rate. We took one-third of our children and hope that they will use the money and grow it better. If they waste it, well, it's one-third gone, right? But I put one-third in emerging markets. This is the person that I don't know, but if they make money, they're going to make a big money,

and if they lose it, I may lose big also. So that's asset allocation. And what has happened today is that previously the West, the banker is telling you, oh, you are short of liquidity, so therefore you put more of my money with you. So that's what we did after the Asian crisis. We put more money in the reserves. And then after Afghanistan and Russia, they said, sorry, you cannot withdraw your money. I will freeze it or I will confiscate it.

For no reason at all, there's no court of appeal on this issue. So suddenly the international monetary system, is not what it was supposed to be. I put my money in the bank. I don't expect it to get frozen or I cannot withdraw it or confiscated. This is what happened to Afghanistan, right? So then the key question is who do you trust now? Either you trust your own people or you trust your fellow emerging market person, right?

And that's what the rest should do. If the West plays by a very different rule for what they profess, the rest must think for ourselves. Now, here is the crux of the question. A young person asked me one day, he said, what is my best asset? And what should I put my money in? I said, you don't realize your best asset is yourself. You must trust yourself.

You must have confidence in yourself. Only when you have confidence in yourself, can you grow? If every day you said, well, I am not better than the best, the guy in Hollywood is best, the guy in, you know, Silicon Valley is best. Hello, Indonesia has produced Gojerk, you know? I mean, China has produced Alibaba, right? All these are ideas that came out of the blue and became unicorns. So we must have confidence in ourselves.

And when we have confidence in ourselves and we put money in our, our own people, and our friends and neighbors, everybody benefits. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Look, I, you know, I want to put this in the context of how money is only going to grow, right? Demographics in the next few decades is only going to get older. Savings is only going to go up.

And money can only be invested in a finite number of asset classes. intuitively, cost of capital will only come down. If cost of capital will come down in the next few decades, there is that perennial risk of this elitization of money that you've been talking about, alluding to in many of your lectures and books, right? The elites being able to take advantage of that liquidity much better, much faster, much more than the,

non-elites, right? So the risks of elitization. So that could only be compensated, if not, you know, challenged by our being able to teach as many of ourselves as possible to be much more entrepreneurial, right, to take on risk. Now, with this in mind, we're seeing this trend in the last few years of def financialization, decentralized finance by way of blockchain that has been able to decentralize. And if you take a look at the Gen Z members or even the younger ones, they seem to have no issues at all with anything that's so disruptive with respect to centralistic systems, right? Does that give you more hope that entrepreneurship is is going to rise much more than we've ever seen in the last few decades.

And money is going to be better used for these up and rising entrepreneurs more in an equity story as opposed to a fixed income story. You know, you put your finger on the issue. Yeah. The key question again is, do I trust my children and my children's children? Or do I trust some banker who will take my money and laugh all the way to the bank. That's unusual. Right. And, and, you know, so the key question really is, what is money? Money is a social construct. It is imagination. Yeah. There was this English physicist

called Frederick Sodi, who basically said, the real economy, which is nature, cannot grow more than, in in arithmetic terms, three to five percent per year. As you know, GDP over thousands of years was maximum 2% per year. And that's the natural regeneration of nature. It cannot grow the 25% ROE. What is the difference between the two to three percent of a forest regenerating and 25% demanded by the most, companies that say, if you don't deliver 20% ROE, I'm not going to look at this.

The answer is leverage. If I leverage my money to buy this forest, I will be able to get 25%. But if something happens, all my leverage will go and the whole system goes past. That's exactly the problem that we face now. Yeah. So the elites are creating money as if it was a opportunity to take money from everybody. The old Chinese saying was you muddy the water in order to catch fish. When the thing is too opaque, you'll never be able to catch fish because the fish can see you coming.

But if it was money, the fish doesn't know where it goes and somebody catches it and eat it. And so the rest, we don't know whether there's still fish. left, you know, in the pond, right? So that's exactly what has happened with financialization. They make it more and more complicated. So less and less people understand. So less and less people understand, they will leave it to so-called experts to manage that money. And the expert will bring out another noble laureate or whatever to say, my model is best, or another fashionable term, ESG. It is going to be the best. But is it the best? But is it the best? I don't know.

Whatever everybody says it becomes the best, sometimes somehow or other I seem to lose money in it. Ultimately, I have to trust myself, right? I have to trust my children. So where does Sefi, which is the centralized financial system, everything goes clear through a central bank. And ultimately, foreign exchange gets clear through the New York Fed using the SWIF system. That's hierarchical, top down. everybody sees the people at the top sees everything that's happening at the bottom.

The reason that why the millennials like Defi decentralized finance is because it is a flat you know absolutely the distributed blockchain, right?

Your money goes encrypted into one block then it goes encrypted into the second block and the third block, and finally, you know, it goes to whoever you want you to go. Nobody's supposed to be able to see it. But of course, that's not true. You know, some of the blockchain can be decrypted. And if you happen to lose your passwords, you know, you will lose your money. Right. But the difference is this. The millennial, the millennial is sitting every day on their computer or their mobile phone. And they say, look, uh, uh, Gita, I want to pass some money to you.

you. And, you know, I will give you some of this in cybercurrency. And the other side, they don't care if the cyber currency is going up and down because they know the markets are going up and down anyway. Right. Right. So, and so you get a scale effect, the more people that use that Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cyber currency, the value goes up. Now, the value has gone up mostly because QE has brought the Fiat money up. Right. Right. And now that QE is being contracted because of higher interest rate, the bubble in the, in the, the, the, the, the, the, the

cryptocurrencies are also deflating. But it will not go away because today's economy is actually the knowledge economy. Right. If I am digitized, right. I have access to monetization. monetization of what I have got, either in art or NFT or whatever. Okay? And so the result is the millennials, which are the mass market now,

they are capable of changing the world. Now, it doesn't mean that during this shake-up of QE, which is now happening, right, there will not be some more bankruptcies of big companies, big borrowers, as some countries, as well as some blockchain, start-ups, cyber startups, etc. This will happen. This is nature, right? Nature says nothing is forever, right? Nothing is forever.

Sometimes some things bloom, and then, you know, nature takes care of itself. it dies and it regenerates exactly like the virus. It innovates. It adapts. It mitigates. So deafy is definitely the way to go. This doesn't mean that the world will all be deafy. It will be a hybrid between Cephy, you know, a centralized finance and decentralized finance.

Who now invents that platform is going to be critical. Yeah. And this is where Indonesia has got scale, right? This is why China and Indonesia has suddenly discovered. You notice India is not doing badly, and India was the first to go into technology, right? Right. And yet, surprisingly, the Indian tech companies did not invent Tencent, Alibaba, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, gojack happened in Indonesia.

Okay? Right. And the reason is, you know, when a... you are successful, you actually stick to what you are successful, you forget about the new. And it is the diversity of ideas, the scale of the market plus the diversity that creates, you know, the innovation. And I think this is why it's so exciting that the rest is now catching up with the West in terms of new ideas, new innovation, new technology. not necessarily in basic sciences, but in its application. Now, the finance area is where we now are able to change

because the West cannot change because they are debt-driven. And in the rest, where we are younger population, savings is a function of age, right? We save when we are young and when we are strong in preparation for when we retire. We see this in Asia because Japan is aging very fast. The median age of a Japanese is 48. Okay? And in 20, 30 years time, there will be one young person supporting one retired person in Japan.

It's unthinkable, what's happening. right? The median age of a Chinese, you know, in China is 38. The median age in Indonesia and ASEAN is 28. Yeah. That's a hell of an advantage. Exactly. We have a huge demographic dividend which we will be able to get. Okay. Yeah. But we must also now learn the lesson. We cannot consume everything for ourselves. We must leave more for our next generation. the millennial. Now, when our mindset changes like that, it's very different from the West. The West is thinking, me, me, me, me, I want it now, you know. But hello, if I have it now, we will destroy Mother Nature. We will make life unequal because I consume and my children cannot consume, right? My children's children will never be able to see the beautiful forests, the

beautiful reefs, the clean water, the clean air, right? If we don't do our climate action now. And we can now do it because thanks to the internet, technology is now widely available. Yeah. I'm with you on Defi. I think Defi will be much more pervasive, globally speaking, and much more so in Asia. And I see it with my own eyes, how the younger generations, the Gen Z and a number of the millennials, and even the later generations, you know, younger than the Gen Zs. And they're taken up this concept that, you know, basically epitomizes their distrust of anything that's been centralistic for a long time. The key, I think, is to make sure that this massive mass. amounts of liquidity that are going to be created going forward or that would have been created

gets funneled through defy more for risk-taking purposes, not debt, but equity. And that, I think, is going to be key. So I think the onus is upon us to make sure that we educate the society to take advantage of this. I want to, there's lots of questions branching out of what you've just said, but I want to touch on this. What is the importance of emerging economies undertaking their own quantitative easing initiatives? Is there any merit to that? Compicadding, whatever the developed economies have been doing for a long time? No, I think QEE will prove in history to be a dead end.

It is a drug in which you have to take more of it and you will have less impact. We see this already. QE has not improved overall productivity. The risk of the productivity has gone down, the more the QE there is. I think central banks begin to understand this already. Got it. Because it is so easy. You know, you just create money out of nowhere and then you, you, you, you, you, you, you,

You say you can have it now, right? Whereas who would want to invest in the long term when the short term you can speculate and win everything? The trouble with the speculation is ultimately somebody's paying for it. And Mother Nature and poorer people are paying for all this QE, which is why I think emerging market central bankers have been much more cautious. Yeah. Okay.

Partly because they don't allow the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, develop markets don't trust the emerging markets, say you have high risk. So therefore, I will not allow you to do QE. You do QE, I'm going to devalue, you know, you're speculate against you and you will have devaluation, capital outflows, and then you will die. And so when the, when the West keeps on saying, oh, you know, it's our money, what do you mean it's your money? It's our money. It's our emerging market money. We've been buying their securities, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Out of that, the 12 trillion of official reserves, you know, something like two-thirds belong to the emerging markets.

Right. Mostly the Chinese and Japanese. It's not just the Chinese. You know, it's the Japanese. It is the others, right? And the way the bargain was done was that money went to the financial centers and it gets recycled back in terms of FDI and FPI foreign portfolio investment. But now under ESG, they say, sorry, you do not meet ESG standards.

So therefore, me, the glass. Go Financial Alliance for net zero. Yeah. With police ESG. So they police, they say, your money cannot be lent back to you or invest in you because you do not comply with ESG. Appa, I'm sorry to say this. Okay.

This is our money. So if it is our money, why do we need to keep so much foreign exchange reserves? Yeah. We need to keep very large foreign exchange reserves. because we have as central banks pay gross for every settlement, whereas the market is playing net, right? Okay? So the market can speculate against the central banks,

which have an unequal defense in the system, which actually forces us to hold money in very liquid short-term interest rates, with low interest rates, and then suddenly it's now subject to sanctioned, exposure to risks, exposure to freezing and seizure. So why don't we put money back to ourselves? We invest more in our own people. We don't have this problem.

And this was my lesson when I worked in Banggara. In Malaysia, investing in the Kampong will actually enrich the city. Investing in the city, spending money in the city, the money will flow to London. hour square because the city people love imports, right? Yeah, yeah. Whereas if you spend more on your own people, the circular economy will function better. Absolutely, absolutely.

So Defi and emerging markets have now the opportunity not to go the old way of QE, but actually to help each other create net clearing systems within ASEAN and the region, so that instead of holding so much reserves in reserve currencies, we net it out. So if I owe you $100 US dollars and you owe me 80, I pay you only 20. Rather than I pay you 100, if somebody does not pay you and then you had to pay out the other 100,

you don't have money to pay me. You're in trouble, right? So if we net everything, we do not need to keep so much reserves. And that savings can be invested back in our domestic economy. Andrew, I want to push on this. And this will be my last QE-related question. If we put this in the context of most of the emerging economies, right,

put aside China, put aside Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea. If you take a look at the M2 to GDP ratios, they're still well below 50%. Absolutely. If you take a look at the bank asset to GDP ratios, they're still below 50%. If you take a look at the capital markets to GDP ratios, they're still below 50%. I take your argument on not doing QE for emerging economies, right? But how do we get this needle to move up from less than 50% to 100% so that we can see the

entrepreneurs blossom as quickly as we would want that. to. How do we, yeah. You know, let me, let me, let me give you an example, right? The Indonesians, I'm sorry, the Indians, when they created an ADA, which means a digital certification for every citizen. Right. They actually created digital accounts for every citizen. And then they, that was far, far more inclusive than the banking system, which has been there since the British was there and still something like about 70% of the population didn't have bank accounts. What does that tell you? It tells you that the old idea of M1, M2, M3, M4 collapses.

Is only for the elite in the cities. Okay. Right? Got it. And so the issue, I saw this in Indonesia, right? You know, the bank Passa, where the bank actually goes in the bus

or a van to the nearest Kambung Passa, the market, and in the morning, they lend everybody a hundred US dollars equivalent, and at the end of the day, you pay back $110 in the equivalent, right? Everybody wins.

Because if I am a poor farmer, I go to the market, I don't have money, but if you lend me one juta, you know, I can sell buy and sell, I can earn 30%, and I pay you back 10%. I still earn 20%. But I could not have earned that 20% if I did not have the liquidity and the trust in me.

The traditional liquidity, yeah. Exactly. Got it. Got it. Right? So the trust in your own people cannot be wrong, right? I mean, you know, it's your own people. Now, you know, there are people who are always will not want to pay or for whatever reason. But you will find, you know, in the Islamic Bank and Grameen Bank,

trusting in women pays off. Trusting in rural people pays off. We've seen that here too. We've seen that here. In many of the Kampongs in the villages, you'd be amazed. The NPLs are actually less than 0.1%. You know, in many villages, it's zero. Yet by way of the empowerment of the women.

The tool says, you know, if the 10% average NPL, you must increase the interest rate by 10%. Right? And of course, naturally, the poor cannot, you know, don't have the collateral. So you add another premium risk. And in the end, the risk is all transferred to the gumbo. It cannot be done. It's not fair. Yeah. I want to, okay, let's move on to defy, okay, blockchain. I think it's going to be massive. And I've been talking about how basically blockchain can actually be applied to non-economic units. You mentioned the climate issue as I don't see any reason how blockchain cannot be applied to climate-related.

Units of measurement, whatever they could be, diversity, biodiversity. You could actually empower blockchain for, assigning a unit or a value to any particular unit of diversity, biodiversity, and climate-related stuff, don't you think? That's the case? Absolutely right. You know, there is a sea change with blockchain and nature. Only, you know, our GDP numbers were first started when the United Nations created the system of national accounts in 1953. Only in 2021, in Glasgow COP 26, did the United Nations agree to value nature as capital?

Right? Wow. Yeah. Now, it goes to show the nature was never calculated. When I was growing up in Saba, I saw a guy took a chainsaw and cut down a 150-year-old tree, right? As the tree falls, it kills how many young trees, and then the bulldozer drags it all out. the value of that tree is not calculated in GDP. The GDP is actually in buying the tractor,

the depreciation, the value added from the tractor, and the labor input into this. This is nonsense. Yeah. You know, and that is why we've been cutting down all our trees. And today, I was, last week, I was talking with somebody from Sabah, you know, and he was saying how his plantation, he is hiring indigenous people, the oral moot, you know,

to collect the seedlings. from the best trees and replanted them, and then replanted them back in nature using natural compost, no chemical fertilizers, no pesticides, and then they are getting production four times more wood than just cutting down the natural forest. Wow.

That is innovation. Now, where does blockchain come into this? Blockchain is to make sure that there is integrity in that information. And so therefore, if we are able, you know, one of the big problems in our gambung is that we do not, even if we are saving carbon, we cannot price it. There is no carbon market in Indonesia or in ASEAN. It's a very dysfunctional market. Even in the West, the price per ton of carbon is $20 U.S. dollars in America and 100 euros in Europe. Now, if we get a trusted basis for which we are able to tell somebody in Europe that every ton of carbon in the gampo, in the village that we are actually capturing, you pay us 100, 100 euros,

we benefit. It is an income that was never there before. We can only do this in a system that the West will trust. So we will get a European consultant to verify this and we will build the blockchain to help this. And in that way, the people in the rural areas will be able to benefit. Yeah, absolutely. So there are ways in which we can do this through Defi. We haven't built that platform yet.

Yeah. You know, if we take a look at the growth of ASEAN economies in the last 25 years, It's only grown about three times compared to China's having grown by 10 times, 9 to 10 times in the same period, right? And I'm a big believer that ASEAN is going to be able to do better in the next 25 years. And we're only talking about taking advantage of the low-tech stuff, not even the high-tech stuff, right? And I get to see many of these guys experimenting with too much of the high-tech stuff, but not being able to be of utility and a bit of a timing issue. Whereas the low tech changes productivity, you know, the way they could reap economic benefits by orders of magnitude. And I see how these tech disruptors are going to be able to play a role in usuring a much better prosperity for every big.

in Southeast Asia. Now, my question to you is, if we take a look at the applications of the five main disruptions, genomics, AI, robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, if you listen to many of the experts in Silicon Valley, I mean, just the equity story delta arising out of these five disruptors in the next 10 to 20 years, we're talking about more than $200 trillion of economic delta. Man, imagine if many of us in Southeast Asia, if not all of us, take advantage of this, you know,

disruptions from a technological standpoint and how they could actually help us. move forward and shape it more in an equity story as opposed to a debt story. It's a hell of a story, don't you think? Absolutely. I'm a great believer in ASEAN. I recently, in my writings, I keep on telling North Asia. Okay, North Asia is where all the money is because they're aging, right? You know, Japan, South Korea, you know, China, Taiwan, etc. In Hong Kong, right? The four, five of them, including Singapore, accounts for 73.8% of the $18 trillion net liability of the United States. And I keep on telling them that why are you investing all your money in the West and you ignore ASEAN, which is half the population of China, right? 700 billion.

Right. Right. And, you know, growing to now with the best demographic profile, growing at 6 to 7%, and we would, some of our economies within ASEAN, will definitely reach 10%. Right? No question about it.

Because of the technological dividend and the demographic dividend. All right. Now, you know, you think about technology. How, you know, who invented the karaoke? You know, the technology was actually in Japan, but it was a Taiwanese who actually put the microphone with all the tapes, you know, and then produce the karaoke machine. And then that took off in the whole of Asia, right? So we do not need in ASEAN to be basic science.

That will come later. Right. Our applied technology is our real advantage. Yeah. And market scale. Yeah. Okay? And we have young, you know, I, just to share with you my story, you know, I love Iqat.

And I travel throughout Indonesia in places that some Indonesians have not been to. And whenever, you know, those days I was in Hong Kong, I was very proud of my BlackBerry. And when I, my BlackBerry worked everywhere in Indonesia, you know, but whenever I put out my BlackBron, My Indonesian friend also put out their Blackberry, some of which may not be genuine, but it goes to show how digitally smart they are. Yeah. Right. And therefore, what has happened? We are witnessing a revolution of innovation in Indonesia.

I see this in Vietnam. I see this, you know, in Cambodia, Laos, you know, everywhere, right? including in my own country in Malaysia, the mindset change now is completely open. Yeah. Okay, they are, they, they are open to technology, right? And so they will change faster than somebody who is aging in the West. And in also North Asia.

Yeah. Okay. So I'm a great believer in the future of ASEAN. I think it's coming. and when some people ask me, where do I, would I invest my money? I said I would invest in my own neighborhood, right? Because that's where the future is. Now, we have not built, you know, we have, the ASEAN regulators, central banks,

have not had enough confidence in each other to be able to network these markets. I believe that networking of these markets, especially in the equity market, bring a great future. That's got a change, man. Look, okay, take into account the technological dividend, the demographic dividend, and then not to mention the China dividend, right? You put this in the basket of the equity story, and I like what you've alluded to in the past where, you know, if you're from the Kampong, you can't immediately go to the stock market. You got to do the equity story on a step-by-step basis, and you refer to it as the multi-stage. stock market. Talk about that, Andrew. And I do believe that it's so relevant to the needs of,

you know, the ASEAN people, the entrepreneurs in ASEAN. Okay, you know, the West is best. That's what I believed in, right? I mean, I worked in Hong Kong, which was the freest market. Okay, it's linked to the dollar. The West is best. Wall Street is best. NASDAQ is our Olympian, Olympic Games. Right. Then, you know, after I stepped down in 205, the Chinese invited me to go up there and advise them. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized, my goodness, how elite the current system is. There are only 58,200 listed companies in the world. And they account for $124 trillion market cap. But 80% of that is accounted for by the top 1,000 companies. Okay? Right? And how many sort of SMEs are there, you know, just in Malaysia alone?

2,000 listed companies and 1.2 million SMEs. Okay? So if there's 1.2 million SMEs in Malaysia, you can imagine how many hundreds of millions in Indonesia, right? Well, supposedly 60 million. Well, okay. Let's say 60, okay? So therefore, that 60 million has no chance of getting equity.

Yeah. Right? Now, so think about it. Here is Olympics, and every one of us says, we want to establish our stock market to join the Olympics. But you cannot join Olympics in one step. You have to go multi-stage. You have to have your kindergarten,

your, which what central banks call sandbox, then you have the primary school, then you have the secondary school, then you go to college, then you go to postgraduate, then you join the Olympics, right? So the issue here is, who is doing the training

between the Olympics and the primary school in our part of the world? Answer, nobody. Right. And most they say, consumer literacy, investor literacy. You know, I mean, you tell them to invest in products they don't understand.

So what we did in Malaysia was very useful. We started in Malaysia with the tabung haji, right? Because people invest for their programage. Right. Then we started with the, you know, the PNB, you know, right? The Pomodalan, you know, national barhard, which actually created the mutual fund right, which invested in stocks, which then gave them a good return. And those people who retire put their money in Employees Provident Fund,

which yields roughly 5 to 6% per year, better than a bank deposit, which at the moment gives me maximum 1.5%, 2%. Okay? So the result is the Kampong people started beginning to understand what is equity. But just to ask them to understand, what is equity, then to tell them going to invest in very speculative stocks, is not the way to go. So we really need to teach entrepreneurship to our school children, right? We have to tell our school children, look, it was risk-taking that is the flip side of being

risk-adverse. You know, I mean, yes, life is good if you're risk-adverse, but if everybody is risk-adverse, you get nothing created. You know, risk taking is the success comes from failure. We should not be afraid of failure. Right. Okay? So in school, we really need to teach them creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship.

Right. And what we should be doing, people like you and I who have learned business, should go back to the schools and teach them how we learn. learn to make money. How it works. Right? Because they had no, there were no, you know,

if I am in school and the textbook says, the businessman is the bad guy. You know, the businessman is always exploiting me. Yeah, it's true. But the point is, there are also businessmen who are creating jobs. Yeah. Right? And by the way, you

can also be a businessman, right? Just like, you know, President Jokoi, you know, start around as a business business. business man, right? So once you understand business, you then understand economics. It's not just politics. It's about economics and about social and ultimately about governance. So the real story is that we need to train our entrepreneurs at the primary school, at the secondary school, at the university level. Now, at the university level, we are still, the textbooks are still using

NASDAQ is the ultimate goal. What they haven't told you, because the textbooks are always written 20, 30 years later, what they haven't told you is that the real story now is private equity. And private equity is different from public equity because private equity is about mentoring and coaching entrepreneurs. Just because you have a good idea is not enough. You have to have the right HR, the human resources. You have to have the right branding.

You have the right CFO. You have the right execution team. You have the right technology team. Right? And the private equity is the producer that put all these together. Now, private equity is only just beginning in Asia. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's why that is the wave of the future. We now need to generate the private equity returns, which are superior to the public equity returns and superior to the bond returns. Right, right. Right. How do this will be our future. And, you know, it's a great pity

that, you know, people like me are preaching in the wilderness because most of my contemporaries within Asia are trained in the best schools in the West and they still think West is best. We got to wake up to this. We got to wake up to this. I'm with you. Andrew, let me, you know, you take us to the last bit of the conversation

where I usually ask my guest about what the picture is going to look like in 2045, for ASEAN, for Southeast Asia. And let me take you back to history, right? If we take a look at the last 500 years, 500 years ago, the highest GDP per capita in the world was only two times as high as the lowest GDP per capita in the world. Fast forward to 200 years ago, the GDP per capita that's highest is five times higher than the lowest. As of today, the GDP per capita that's highest in the world is more than 300 times higher than the lowest GDP per capita in the world. We have done ourselves injustice, right, by way of infusing so much liquidity into the system, we call it financial inclusion.

It hasn't translated into the kind of equality that we would have wanted, right? you have alluded to how we can actually challenge the pre-existing system by way of a few things, such as defy, that could actually help liquefy the economy in a much more distributed manner. Is there hope for those metrics to reverse in the direction that perhaps ASEAN could be a beneficiary of in a big way, that we're seeing much greater equality in ASEAN by way of the empowerment of DFI, by way of the empowerment of liquidity for all the masses, by way of teaching people not to borrow, but to take on more equity risks,

by teaching people to be more entrepreneurial and to teach people not to look up to the West as much as we would have in the past, God knows, decades, if not hundreds of years. Tell us. I think, Pakita, you actually lose it to history. You know, the Indians have just started to write about their economic history in the last 500 years, or more like 250 years. In 1750, India was 25% of world GDP, 25% of the world's population. By the time of independence, it was 4% of world GDP.

The calculation was that the... the colonial masters took 45 trillion out of India, okay, in today's money terms. 45 trillions. 45 trillion. My gosh. Look at Professor Utsa, classic work on this. Nobody has done this for Indonesia. How much?

Oh, I would love to do it. Now, I think you should finance a research worker in Indonesian universities to do this work. It's probably not going to be far off from India's number. Absolutely right. I mean, you know, people have forgotten this. And they say, well, I regret, I have remorse. But by the way, when I ask you to put so more money to help climate change, oh, sorry, sorry, that's your business because you are producing more carbon.

You know, I mean, what nonsense is this, right? That's one point. But the real future, in my view, is that I am very, very optimistic to tell you the truth. There are caveats in this. The reason is, if you, I tell, you know, many of my Malaysian friends are very pessimistic and they blame somebody, you know, they blame the system, they blame everybody. And I said, look, forget about the blame game. Okay, we look to the future. What is the future? How lucky we are. We in Malaysia have a government that is politicking a lot,

and I will not say why. I don't have to explain why. We have today the highest oil price, the highest palm oil price, and our electronic factories are booming. And all because of geopolitics. You know, the geopolitics outside, the money is coming in. Just the state of Penang,

this year will get $18 billion in foreign. investment. Mostly, half of it will be by Intel who is investing in their semiconductor plant in Penang itself. So the future is with us. It's not just Malaysia that's growing. Vietnam 100 million is growing 6, 7%, heading towards 8. Right. Philippines, 100 million is growing 5 to 6%. Indonesia, 5%. to six, seven, eight, no problem in my view. Get your infrastructure right. Invest in your people, no problem, right?

So ASEAN growing to the fourth largest economy in the world as a grouping, I have total confidence because I trust our young. I just came back from Bali for thanks to Bangladesh, inviting me to the seminar there. And I was shocked by how many of my favorite Waurong Warong disappeared because of COVID. I was shocked my favorite hotel is closed. I was shocked when I, you know, see the devastation of so many shops being closed.

Yet I admired my friend, Bwawa Yan, who worked solely to safeguard his family hotel, kept everything clean, safeguard his workers, and showed the courage and determination. Right. That, you know, what it showed me was that in ASEAN, our young people have hope. Yeah.

Not only we have hope, we have courage, we have smuggled. You know, we really have smang-at, right? Yeah. And that smang-at is the one that will take us to the next level. Yeah. What do we need to do is to tell our leaders believe in our own people, believe in our young. Okay? And if we believe and we get the best from the rest and the West, we will succeed.

Because if you go to South America, they have deep problems. You go to Africa, they have deep problems. If you go to the Middle East, they have complicated problems, right? Whereas in ASEAN, we have been growing almost nonstop for the last 50 years. And we have the biggest market in China, North Asia, and in India also growing. And, you know, we have cultural ties to the whole world. which means that we will get the best from everybody. At this point of time, if we don't make it,

the only fault is our own. Right? So, you know, I really... The onus is on us. Yeah, the onus is on us. The owners is not... Somebody else is to be blamed. You know?

No. Each one of us have a responsibility to our family, our community, our state, our nation, and mother nature. And that philosophy is built into the Indonesian national motto, you know, Benika, Tunga, you know, right?

It's unity in diversity. You recognize the diversity. People are very different. But if we unite, we'll be stronger, just like, you know, Malaysia we have, right? Okay. So to a large extent, we now need to walk our own talk. Just do it, right?

We have fascinating. Huge future ahead of us. And yes, there are caveats. You know, if the United States decide to, and China decide to fight for whatever reason, you know, and I hope they won't. Yeah. Right. But the problem is that these are beyond my pay grade, you know, beyond my time, right? I count myself very lucky to have lived a period when I witnessed the greatest revolution that has happened to all our lives.

When I first went to visited Indonesia, you know, Cambodia, etc., life was poor. Yeah. It's changed, man, big time. It's changed. It's changed. And that's why the future is now. It's here. Let's believe it. Hey, Andrew, it's been fascinating. That was my last question, but I got one more last question. And it's a philosophical one. What makes you tick? What makes you happy? Well, you know, every day I count my blessings, right? I have this close connection with you. Bali and not just body but eat the body because my wife and I love Iqat and I consider

Iqat our Wari's son our heritage yeah they are so beautiful they they celebrate they celebrate culture they celebrate the the arts you know and and and and and and and and and to me that's what keeps me to be able to enjoy to to to to have time with family and friends is a blessing. And I thank, you know, I'm not a religious person, but I count our blessings every day. Thank you. Andrew, thank you so much for being on our show.

Thank you. Great honor to be here. Teman, that's Andrew Shang. I'm a man-sai. Manthan-pimpinan from Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission. Thank you. This is Endgame.