By: La Papillion
It's been a while since I blogged because I am too busy with work to do anything. There's so much happening in the world today that I had barely enough time to catch up on the major developments unfolding right now. There is no shred of doubt that we're all sitting right in the middle of this action and we all have the honour to bear witness to this historical event happening right before our eyes. When all these are over, and when necessary heads are rolled and the dust settled, we will all look back and say that hey, we've survived this "once-in-a-century" event!
Lehman brothers, who had been around for 158 years, declared bankrupt as the debts piled up and they could not find any white knight to save them. AIG, major insurance player in US, almost fell when they too needed a lifeline to save them from bankruptcy. It's a great irony to see that management of AIG, being involved in insurance whose role is to spread risk, did not practice what they preached. As the Queen song goes, 'Another bites the dust'.
Locally, we're not spared from the financial nuclear bomb that erupted over at US. Many policyholders of AIA, a subsidiary of AIG, had terminated their plans, fearing the worst had yet to come. Despite the calming pleas from AIA (they had taken the trouble to print a whole page in Straits Times newspaper about the situation of AIA), holders of their plans did not believe them. This is a classic case of the extreme pessimism and fear that spreads over the minds of people these days.
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