State of Emergency in Bangkok

[swaraj]

That's the end of the fun for this week then, wonder what the reds will come up with next, wait to here from the leader of the gang i guess

[thaibound]

(Snick @ Apr. 13 2009,10:20) Exactly, when talking about the GDP 6% is a big number (and the real number is higher).

The fact that the real number is unofficial is meaningless, its still money. And the person using that money still goes out and buys things and pays a VAT tax on those items (usually).

Plus tourism is labor intensive, if tourism goes down LOTS of people lose there jobs.

If Thai Air is still flying and suvarnabhumi still open, I'll be arriving april 23 to do whatever i can to lift up that tiny but all-important piece of GDP. I figure tourism won't have to go down if we can keep enough lb's going down instead. And i intend to do my part.

My question for anyone on the ground now -- would i be more likely to dodge any red/yellow disruptions by heading straight from the airport to pattaya or just as safe taxiing into nana for my first few nights?

Thanks.

[rxpharm]

Thaibound, keep an eye on the news until early next week. If all stays quiet up to then, I think there won't be any problems heading to Nana for the first few nights.

You will probably benefit as a lot of the Japanese have left and those incoming have canceled their trips - the ladies are hurting for business right now.

[manarak]

the ladies are hurting for business right now.

and their asses itching!


I too think it is over for some months now.
Thaksin's TV has been shut down, the UDD leaders have arrest warrants on them, and there has been no spontaneous upheaval in the provinces after that announcement.

If tension should build up, lots of money and government positions will probably flow to local Isaan politicians to keep their people calm.

[bigmick22]

the following archived article from 1932  is on the economist this week - interesting, I thought. "Plus ca change" and all that

Revolution in Siam

Jul 2nd 1932
From The Economist print edition

Last Friday a successful revolution was achieved in Siam by the officers€”or a clique among the officers€”of the naval and military forces. The heir to the throne and the chief of police were placed under arrest; and the King, who was not in Bangkok when the coup was carried out, returned to the capital and accepted the fait accompli. The only casualty seems to have one high military officer, who was shot and wounded in the act of resisting arrest; and this sole victim is happily expected to recover. The revolutionaries deprecate the application of the term "revolution" to their work; but a revolution does not cease to be a revolution when it is accomplished without loss of life; and this Siamese specimen is not difficult to classify and pigeon-hole. Like the recent alarums and excursions in Chile, the present upheaval in Siam is evidently a political expression of the malaise produced by the pressure of the economic crisis. But the crisis has caught Siam in a different stage of social development from some of these other countries; and accordingly, this Siamese revolution had taken rather a different form. While our Latin-American revolutionaries move in an endless cycle from one dictator or one junta to another, and while the Japanese Fascists are moving backwards from a pseudo-constitutional regime towards a one-party tyranny, the Siamese revolutionaries are moving in the opposite direction€”from absolute monarchy towards self-government. This Siamese affair is a movement, engineered by military officers, for securing a parliamentary constitution; and the nearest obvious modern analogy is the Turkish revolution of 1908. In Siam, as in Turkey, the military officers are the political radicals because they are the element in the country which has been the most deeply imbued with Western ideas. The economic crisis brought the political movement in Siam to a dénouement by imposing the necessity for an increase in taxation€”an increase which the late Government attempted to provide for by imposing a tax on salaries....

[thegame925]

Fatal flaws that wrecked Thailand's promise
By David Pilling

Published: April 30 2009 03:00 | Last updated: April 30 2009 03:00

In 1995 The Economist projected that by 2020 Thailand would be the world's eighth-largest economy. Its forecast, which now looks a tad, shall we say, optimistic, followed a 10-year run in which Thailand muscled out even China as the world's fastest-growing economy, expanding at a blistering 8.4 per cent a year. Those were the days.

The decade after the Asian financial crisis, which began with the devaluation of the baht and ended with the 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister, has not been so kind. Although the country bounced back from the 1997 devaluation, when it carelessly misplaced 15 per cent of gross domestic product in 18 months, the economy never recovered its former vigour. It has bumbled along at a respectable, but less than socially transformative, 4-5 per cent a year. This year its economy is likely to shrink by some 5 per cent. In that, admittedly, it is not alone.

Yet it is fair to ask why Thailand has failed to fulfil its potential. Once mentioned in the same breath as high-tech Taiwan, it is now more likely to be grouped with the Philippines. Far from closing in on the world's eighth-biggest economy - a slot currently occupied by Spain, with an output nearly six times that of Thailand - it languishes in 33rd place. In per capita terms it plods in at an even more pedestrian 78th.

Adding to its woes - or arguably helping to explain them - Thailand is stuck in a seemingly intractable political crisis. Long a country of coup and counter-coup, for years it nevertheless managed to maintain something approaching political stability. Now it is caught in a trap in which a previously disenfranchised rural poor wants a say in a political system dominated by a Bangkok elite not yet prepared to allow the "barbarians" through the gate. The stand-off has undermined the already shaky confidence of foreign and domestic investors.

This month, Thailand showcased its political chaos for flummoxed regional leaders attending the Association of South-east Asian Nations summit. The gathering was cancelled and the likes of Wen Jiabao, China's premier, had to be evacuated after the conference facilities were stormed by a mob of Mr Thaksin's supporters. In subsequent clashes on the streets of Bangkok at least two people were killed. A car carrying Abhisit Vejjajiva, the third prime minister since democracy nominally returned in 2007, was attacked after he declared a state of emergency. There are, Mr Abhisit said with admirable understatement in a Financial Times interview last week, "some major challenges we have to face up to".

One of the reasons Thailand has failed to flourish as once predicted is that its growth was built on weaker foundations than supposed. What was in the 1950s an economy based on US patronage, and exports of rice and tapioca, developed into one fuelled by Japanese capital looking for a home after the revaluation of the yen in the mid-1980s. Japanese companies poured in money, building an industrial base, especially in car manufacturing, that remains central to whatever economic success the country still enjoys.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, local entrepreneurs clambered aboard. The political situation was always chaotic; there have been 11 successful coups since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932. But for much of the time, according to Supavud Saicheua, an economist at Phatra Securities, the country maintained an uneasy equilibrium between monarchy, military, aristocracy and bureaucracy.

Thailand produced few truly world-class companies. It remained, by and large, a rentier economy, funded by foreign capital and driven by foreign expertise. At the time, of course, that was all the rage. In 1991, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held their annual meetings in Thailand, a testimony to its openness and liberal reform. That went to Thailand's head. In 1993 it liberalised its capital account, setting in train the disastrous over-borrowing in foreign currency that ended with the 1997 crash.

That crisis led to what Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker call in their book Thailand's Boom and Bust a "decapitation of Thailand's [foreign-currency indebted] capitalist class". The country has never recovered from the mass beheading. Today, bank lending to business languishes at two-thirds of 1990s levels. The economy has become more dependent on foreign demand, a liability in a world of frightened consumers.

The destruction of Thailand's entrepreneurial class helped pave the way for Mr Thaksin, one of the few capitalist survivors of the crisis. He converted his wealth, which came courtesy of a telephone monopoly, into political capital, riding into office with the votes of a newly empowered rural poor.

Mr Thaksin's election and subsequent conduct proved too much for the Bangkok elite. Its displeasure was finally vented in the coup of 2006, an attempt to roll the country back to a prelapsarian land of smiles. But there is no going back. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear how Thailand can move forward either.

[email protected]
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Direct Link to FT

[mister_smith]

good read thegame925