[2swasseneons]

Thailand seems to have this fetish for copying the West, especially the USA – ‘fashionable’ clothes, supermarket junk foods, ‘modern’ furnishings and appliances, excessively large and new cars etc. Rich people can’t get enough of this stuff, and for them the items obviously represent significant status symbols. Even less well-off people (most are poor) have developed the same thirst for the Western trappings of apparent success which they see on crass TV programmes and read in semi-literate Western magazines translated into Thai. In a way it’s very sad to watch Thai cultural values displaced by what I consider to be vastly inferior western ones.

Sometimes the copying is ludicrous, and sometimes it is plainly unsafe. Sometimes it’s both laughable and dangerous, and the new Government’s economic policies are an example of this.

For months the Bank of Thailand has been saying the country was going to do well despite the major financial crisis occurring everywhere else. Recently, it has become abundantly clear that Thailand is in the same mess as the rest of the world. True to form, the Government’s solution is another copy-cat strategy - this one is called ‘stimulating the economy’ – a cliché used by just about every finance minister everywhere on the planet.

But, how do they actually intend to do this?
Well, firstly for example, they are giving one-off payments of 2000 baht (about $110) to every government employee earning less than 15,000 baht(about $835) a month. That should ‘stimulate’ the economy for perhaps one weekend sometime in April.

Secondly – and this is the choice one – they will be ‘stimulating’ the housing market. They will be giving low income property purchasers the opportunity to borrow a 100% mortgage, and to raise the money for this they will involve private sector investment and insurance interests as well a government bank. Remember the subprime lending practices in the USA which led directly to the collapse of international money markets? The Thai government has just reinvented the same scheme here.

The solution to a financial problem in Thailand is apparently best achieved by creating the same conditions that caused the problem in the first place, a sort of vaccination approach to the prevention of economic depression.

You weren’t thinking of investing any money in Thailand, were you?