Thursday, January 31, 2008  Badawi's State Of Euphoria  Hantu
Laut 30 January 2008 It’s whistling past the graveyard to think
that Malaysia is going to escape a US downturn unscathed  malay-
badawiPrime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is probably wrong if
he is as confident as he says he is that that Malaysia is
positioned to avert any negative fallout from a threatened US
recession by virtue of trade with the rest of Asean, which on
its surface outweighs that of the US.  Following the Davos
conference in Switzerland, the prime minister pointed out that
86 percent of Malaysia's GDP is domestically generated and
added: "This has become one of our economic strengths (as we are
no longer acutely dependent on external trade), and these
strengths have come from the policies that we have drawn up and
implemented, which are far-sighted.”  The speech and figures,
probably prepared for him by the Ministry of International Trade
and Industry, are hardly realistic. While the Malaysian economy
has been robust over recent y