The Government is tabling a bill to raise Malaysia’s statutory debt ceiling from 60% to 65%, in order to fund stimulus measures to help Malaysians get through the pandemic. I think this is timely, and much needed. What is not clear, however, is whether this is a temporary or permanent raising of the debt ceiling (the title of the Bill suggests that this is temporary, but this is not made fully clear), and whether there is a clear plan for Malaysia to bring its debt levels back down to below 60% once the pandemic is truly over. We must not allow emergency measures to become a slippery slope that drives our nation’s finances into further indebtedness, especially after all the losses that we are incurring over the 1MDB looting.
While the debate in Malaysia’s parliament over raising the debt limit looks to be perfunctory, the United States seems to be spiraling into yet another bout of partisan bickering over its own debt ceiling. Madness? Yes. But this is the blowback that the US political class has purchased for itself when it walked blindly into the morass of the War on Terror, and the disastrous consummation of its flirtation with nativist no-nothingism with the Tea Party that had eventually led to Trump’s presidency. There is always a price to pay when you play with extremism in the pursuit of narrow parochial interests.
Here’s an interesting and totally expected thing that usually happens when you conflate a succession race with a plan to recover from a pandemic: the politics will almost always get in the way. What is Singapore thinking? Like mentioned in the article, this is not something that would have happened during Lee Kwan Yew’s time. Another chink in the armour, then, for the PAP government under Lee Hsien Loong?
