Caveat Emptor

Wire-card or Wire-Fraud Wire-card may be a familiar brand to consumers in Singapore. Singaporeans whom have paid for their food through EFTPOS terminals through Visa / Nets /Mastercard will have noted the terminals featuring this particular company. Never could I imagine such a large scale fraud could have happened within the shores of the Singapore financial center. Large scale fraud that I thought to be prevalent in S Chips (Missing cash and regulatory breakdown) in distant shores turned up at my doorstep. Although I am not vested in this company, to have directly used the payment services of a company that is engaged in large scale misrepresentation / fraud is jarring. A scuttlebutt analysis from vendors whom used its payment systems may simply have expected late payments from wirecard, instead of the entire insolvency of the company, which has a market cap of 18.26B as of 23 April. To quote some choice excerpts from the FT investigator / whistle blower Quote ht...

The Rise and Fall of Nations - A Greek Review Much of Finance has been dominated by Greek alphabets such as Alpha (Abnormal returns, Beta (Market Returns), Theta and gamma (with relation to options). A surprisingly little of that is dedicated to recent history and case studies of countries (Noticeably Greece) and what made their economies poor performing. If people take a close look at the rise and fall of modern economies, and steer away from the factors / mistakes made, it will be much more useful compared to forecasting what is largely unknowable. The economic failure of Greece cannot be directly extrapolated to the US economy. Greece noticeably has very different soil, industries and productive capacity, tax regulation and collection, as well as macroeconomic policy compared to the US. Japan is another particular interesting case study which had a lost decade which I will want to read up on. Looking at the Greece situation made me partially relieved that Singapore is probably...