Picked up a copy of today's IHT, which costs as much if not more than a school lunch, and caught up with some of the things that are happening around the world. It's refreshing to know that the world doesn't revolve around 1984-ville government's great & glorious policies.
It would just have been another day's news had it not been a small paragraph in one of the front page news. I mean, after all, in the grand scheme of things, the world is a far more interesting place for the IHT to report on compared to 1984-ville.
Anyway, here are extracts from the co-headlining article "Chinese banks attract world's financial giants". News of such an editorial slant will never see the light of day in 1984-ville...
"For almost a decade, China's state-owned banking system has been in bailout territory.
Since 1998, the government has spent almost $283 billion to shift a mountain of bad loans off the books of state-owned banks...Taken together, this rescue amounts to more than 30 percent of China's gross domestic product for 2004.
And while the Finance Ministry bails, a procession of senior managers at Chinese banks have been led away to serve long prison sentences for embezzlement, fraud and theft."
Further down in the article:
"Along with Temasek, the Singapore government's investment arm, some of the world's top financial institutions have spent $17 billion in China buying sizable chunks of some of the world's worst banks over the past three years." (Emphasis mine, read full article here)
Well, the article is not making a statement that's directed solely at 1984-ville but rather, that investing in China's banking sector is risky and much like 1990's tech bubble where everyone just wants to leap in without looking first.
I don't think the local media will report on that.
Ok, enough refreshing news for today. Back to the daily grind...
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