Africa’s next megacity wants to be like S’pore

Eat yr hearts out, and bang yr balls in frustration, KennethJ, EJay, Goh Meng Seng and other S’porean critics who hate all things PAP even when they work and are to the benefit of S’poreans: an African wants to model his hometown on S’pore (the S’pore before Raymond Lim and Mah Bow Tan messed up throughly its infrastructure; and the S’pore before the PAP let in the FTs in by the cattle truck load to overrun the likes of SGX, DBS, SMRT, and Geylang.)

Nimrod Mushi is a lecturer at Ardhi university, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and is one of the experts commissioned by the government to produce a “master plan” to overhaul the city’s infrastructure. Singapore is his role model, and he favours big projects to clear slums and build bridges, roads and out-of-town settlements.

“When we went to Singapore, we could see their satellite towns, their ring-roads, their skyscrapers and their decentralised services, and it’s working very nicely there,” he says.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18655647

HSBC’s view of emerging mkts

Mkts are flying what with Aug- Oct passing without a mkt collapse and the Fed pumping money into the system. Time to join the party. I’ve sat on the sidelines so far this yr, so I’ll sit on my hands a bit longer. Must admit its hard not to want to do something.

The CEO of HSBC, said late last week, there were likely to be “some bumps in the road ahead” in developing countries, especially in China. Reminder: HSBC generates most of its earnings growth in Asia.

“Our latest data from emerging markets points to a slowdown in the rate of recovery,” he said in a statement. But the bank added that it still expected growth in the region to outpace that of the developed world for the foreseeable future.

He gave a positive outlook for the rest of the year, saying that “the global economy is in better shape than many expected a year ago.” But that “while fears of a double dip in the West may be overplayed, the passage from downturn to upturn is clearly taking longer than previous cycles.”

HSBC said pretax profit in the third quarter was “well ahead” of the period a year earlier, as reserves for bad loans reached its lowest quarterly level since early 2007. Its lending business in the United States accounted for the biggest share of improvements. Business in October was “in line with third-quarter trends,” HSBC said. HSBC does not give detailed earnings figures on a quarterly basis.

The investment banking unit of HSBC also reported a drop in trading. HSBC said performance of the business was “robust although trading activity was lower.”

Africa: How big is it geographically?

Seems, US and China can fit into it with room to spare.

No wonder the Chinese are flocking there http://atans1.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/the-chinese-see-value-in-africa/

The Chinese see value in Africa

The Chinese (people and state-owned enterprises (SOEs)) are flocking to Angola in darkest Africa. The latter are there for the natural resources that China needs, the former because they see the personal opportunities that they see the SOEs drive into China will bring them. Smart people, the Chinese.

So shouldn’t S’porean entrepreneurs and companies (TLCs, GLCs, and SWFs included) head for Africa? Rather than head for China, or Asia as the govmin keeps encouraging us to do? True Asia esp China waz the place to do in the 80s and 90s and early noughties, but if the Jews of Asia are moving on out of their country into Africa, shouldn’t we?

And admiral Cheng Ho was there in the 15th century.

Are our ministers on auto-pilot mode, or is there something they dislike abt Africans?

BTW when I was a student in London in the late 1970s, I got a lot of stick from African students. They tot one LKY was a racist. I argued that he was simply stating facts. This stance cost me dear: I wasn’t invited to partake of raw stakes of lion, zebra or antelope meat. I love steak tartar.