Do you think markets that have liberalised their financial industries tend to have banks that are more resilient to crises?
I think so, I think so. And I think the MAS is doing a very good job. They are not doing piecemeal deregulation. They are looking at the financial sector from a holistic perspective. If you deregulate a small piece of the banking sector – and that was one of the reasons responsible for the Asian financial crisis – where for example, there were a lot of countries which wanted to set up off-shore banking centres like across the causeway, with Labuan and Thailand with their BIBF, they deregulated their bit, but the other bits never happened. So that’s why the distortions showed up during the crisis. Q: There was a recent joint research paper done by the US and the International Monetary Fund. And it found that in 18 of the 25 countries that were studied, the financial sectors had been liberalised at some point 5 years leading up to the crisis. Yet, when the crunch came, they were hit. I’m wondering if it’s safe to assume that markets that’ve been liberalised provide good opportunities. A:
