Buffett warns of inflation, cuts duration of bonds held

(NEW YORK) Warren Buffett shortened the duration of bonds held by Berkshire Hathaway after warning that deficit spending could force inflation higher.
Twenty-one per cent of holdings including Treasuries, municipal debt, foreign-government securities and corporate bonds were due in one year or less as of June 30, Berkshire said in a filing last week. That compares with 18 per cent on March 31, and 16 per cent at the end of last year's second quarter.
'It may be a sign that Buffett expects interest rates to start rising, maybe sooner than the conventional wisdom,' Meyer Shields, an analyst in Baltimore at Stifel Nicolaus & Co said.
Inflation has fallen to a 44-year low even as the Federal Reserve more than doubled its balance sheet in two years to US$2.33 trillion to help draw the economy out of recession.
A US jobs report last week showing that companies hired fewer workers than forecast in July pushed the two-year Treasury yield to a record low. Bill Gross, founder of Pacific Investment Management, advised investors to buy longer-dated maturities.
Mr Buffett, 79, urged Congress last year to guard against inflation as the US economy returned to growth. In an August 2009 op-ed in the New York Times, the Berkshire chief executive said government must address the 'monetary medicine' that was pumped into the financial system after the 2008 crisis.
'The United States is spewing a potentially damaging substance into our economy - greenback emissions,' Mr Buffett wrote. 'Unchecked greenback emissions will certainly cause the purchasing power of currency to melt.'
Berkshire maintains a fixed-income portfolio valued at about US$32 billion to back claims against storm damage and car crashes covered by insurance units like Geico Corp and General Re.
'He's probably biased toward inflation down the road,' said Glenn Tongue, a partner at T2 Partners LLC. 'He would want to gradually make the duration decline because in an inflationary environment it's a longer-term instrument that will be the most hit.' - Bloomberg

Big winner did it all for late mum

Aug 20, 2010
STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

The late starter's cancer-stricken mother died in June
By Leow Si Wan
MADAM Ong Siew Kee just wanted the son she loved to live the best life he could.
An administrative executive married to a foreman, she wanted her second child to work hard in school and live with purpose.
But Chang Ze Xun, though a good kid, was content to drift along.
'I slept in class and failed all my main subjects at the O levels,' said the former student of Hua Yi Secondary School. Those grades qualified him for the Institute of Technical Education (ITE). His parents were disappointed, but supported his decision.
Madam Ong would have been proud of her son yesterday - he was one of four winners of the inaugural Lee Hsien Loong Award for Outstanding All-Round Achievement for post-secondary students.
In fact, he was the biggest winner of the day, also winning the Sultan Haji Omar Ali Saifuddien Book Prize and the Lee Kuan Yew Scholarship to Encourage Upgrading, for ITE and polytechnic graduates.
But it was a bittersweet achievement for the young man, now 20 and a second-year mechanical engineering student at Singapore Polytechnic.
His mother, to whom he was 'extremely close', was not there to see him collect his awards. She had died on June 30, at age 52.
Yet it was only because of her that he had come this far. In his second week at the ITE, some two years ago, Madam Ong told him she had had a relapse of breast cancer. It was a wake-up call.
'She said I can't continue my life like that and that this could be the last time she would address me this way,' said the bespectacled youth softly. 'I started working much harder.'
He did - obtaining a perfect GPA score of 4.0 and becoming top student of ITE College West this year.
He also promised her he would win a new award he had found out about.
To give her reason to hang on, he made her a promise. 'I told her I would win this so she must stay alive to see me on stage,' said Ze Xun.
'Although she isn't here now, I know she will be happy. I will be visiting her at the columbarium, and will take my certificate along.'
The ITE held a mock graduation ceremony at his five-room flat in Jurong West the day Madam Ong died.
Said Ze Xun with tears in his eyes: 'That day, she was not responsive. But when the ceremony started, she opened her eyes and tried to sit up.
'After her death, because I remembered my promise, I really tried during the interview for the award. I spoke for 40 minutes.'
Ze Xun wants to go to a university here and eventually become a teacher.
His father, Mr Chang Swee Fatt, 56, no longer questions his choices. He said in Mandarin: 'When he told me he would go to ITE because he did not qualify for his first choice at the polytechnic, I was against it at first and wanted him to choose another poly course. He convinced me in the end, and now, after taking a longer route, he is studying in the place he had wanted to all along.'
At the annual Special Awards Presentation Ceremony at Seameo Regional Language Centre yesterday, awards were given out in nine different categories, to recognise students' achievements in academic and non-academic spheres. A total of 122 students received more than 130 awards.

Manila to study US$10b offer for casino franchise

Business Times - 10 Aug 2010

Manila to study US$10b offer for casino franchise
San Miguel chief intends to bid for govt monopoly with Robert Kuok and 2 other M'sian tycoons
(MANILA) Philippine President Benigno Aquino said yesterday his government would study a US$10 billion offer from a local tycoon to take over the government's monopoly casino franchise with Malaysian help.
Ramon Ang, vice-chairman of food and beverage giant San Miguel, made the stunning offer unofficially in an interview with the mass circulation Philippine Daily Inquirer, which carried his comments on its front page.
'It is a proposal, it is a very interesting proposal. But at the same time we have to study the matter first,' Mr Aquino told reporters.
'(We) have to ensure that if we intend to sell something, it is at the best price we can get.'
Mr Aquino, who began his six-year term as president on June 30, has said he is looking at privatising state assets to help deal with a growing budget deficit, and the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp (Pagcor) could be sold off.
'The sale of Pagcor fits in well with the president's agenda. Why wait for six years to have US$10 billion when you can have US$10 billion in just six months,' Mr Ang said, according to the Inquirer.
'Isn't this a spectacular deal?' Mr Ang said he intended to make a formal bid to acquire Pagcor once it was formally put on the auction block for privatisation, the Inquirer reported.
He said he intended to go into partnership with Malaysian magnates Robert Kuok, Ananda Krishnan and Francis Yeoh, according to the report.
'They are all my friends and they are interested in Pagcor,' the Inquirer quoted him as saying.
Mr Ang emphasised that he intended to go after Pagcor independently of San Miguel, one of South-east Asia's leading conglomerates.
A spokesman for Pagcor, Jay Santiago, said privatisation would not occur anytime soon.
'It is not as simple as it sounds. Eventually, there will be privatisation, but that is too far off,' Mr Santiago said.
'(But) we agree that US$10 billion is a good benchmark. If and when we do go through that process, at least we know we will not be getting anything below US$10 billion.' Pagcor, which operates 41 casinos, reported a net income of 29.62 billion pesos (S$884 million) in 2008\. \-- AFP

Still screening at 75

Heading upriver in Sarawak to shoot in tribal longhouses was always part of film director L. Krishnan's plans. But what he did not expect was for his boat to capsize, in an action scene that could have come out of one of his own screenplays.

Back in the 1950s, he says, you had to use boats to get anywhere in Borneo. He was not so much worried for himself as for his recordings, which, to his horror, disappeared into the murk. Luckily, he had split the cargo into two boats.

Speaking to LifeStyle on the telephone from Kuala Lumpur, he says: 'I sent the cameraman and the film ahead in one boat. My boat, which sank, had the soundtrack.'

He would later overdub new dialogue and music back in Singapore and release it as Cinta Gadis Rimba, saucily titled The Virgin Of Borneo, in 1958.

The love story between a Malay man and a Dayak woman, which has since sunk into obscurity, is one of the many examples of Malayan cinema made by Cathay- Keris Studio in the 1950s and 1960s, a period now known as a golden age of local film. The studio, together with its rival, Shaw, made hundreds of Chinese and Malay movies during that time.

L. Krishnan today has deep affection for his Borneo feature because it was the first he had done on location, rather than in Cathay-Keris' soundstage in East Coast Road.

Cathay-Keris Studio made its last feature in 1973, the victim of changing tastes and competition from Hollywood.

But its parent, Cathay Organisation, is in good health and is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. The close-knit, family-run firm has a history closely tied to the ups and downs of the entertainment industry in the region. In its time, it has created stars and classic movies and will be remembered for influencing the tastes of generations in Singapore and Malaysia.

Now 88 and a Datuk, the former film director L. Krishnan is today an elder statesman of the Malaysian business community. He has kept links to film-making. His Kuala Lumpur-based Gaya Color Laboratory made the cinema prints for the Singapore comedy Phua Chua Kang The Movie, to be screened here this month, he says.

Another historical footnote about The Virgin Of Borneo is that it is among films of the period to offer the exotically ethnic sights and sounds of Sarawak as entertainment.

Another of Cathay-Keris' most valued assets was comedian Abdul Wahid Ahmad, better known by his stage name Wahid Satay. He starred in films such as Chelorong Chelorong (1962), Bawang Putih Bawang Merah (1959) and Satay (1958).

He is still popular today and performs on television and live shows in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore.

'I'm old but still capable,' jokes the 79-year-old in Malay.

He told LifeStyle that Mr Loke Wan Tho, son of tycoon Loke Yew and co-founder of Cathay, was a key driving force of the Cathay-Keris Studio.

After Mr Loke's death in a plane crash in Taiwan in 1964, 'the movie-making scene died along with him'.

A little-known fact of the golden age of Malay film-making is that it was never especially lucrative.

The small market in Malaya and competition from Indian, Indonesian and Hollywood films made the going tough and Cathay-Keris reported a loss of $1.5 million in its first eight years of operation. Big-budget prestige collaborations and international co-productions in the early 1960s also failed to light up the box office.

Mr Loke's legacy lives on today in the movie distribution, exhibition and other businesses. That side of the organisation has its own stars in its long-serving staff, such as Mr Teo Chai Koon, 67.

He joined the accounts department of Cathay Film Distributor in 1962. His first workplace was not at the more well-known Cathay Building in Handy Road but another bungalow-like building nearby, close to the historic MacDonald House in Orchard Road. �

In his time at Cathay, he has seen the industry change from grand single-screen cinemas to multiplexes and from a one-size-fits-all censorship to today's tiered classification system.

By 1980, he had become assistant manager of programming. One of his tasks was to decide when to start and end a film's run in the cinemas and how many screens it should be given. Hong Kong movies were all the rage when he took on the role, but by the time he retired last year, they, too, had had their time in the sun and are now a shadow of what they used to be.

'They were making too many of them, and they had no variety,' Mr Teo says, referring to how the film-makers would milk previously successful formulas to death.

Cathay is one of the few organisations in Singapore to both date back to pre-war times and to occupy the site on which it was founded.

Urban myths cling to it as a result. During the occupation, the building was taken over by the Japanese propaganda branch and the impaled heads of those who fell afoul of the occupiers were exhibited outside. There is gossip about restless spirits in the area but long-time employee Mr Teo dismisses such talk as nonsense.

'I never saw anything,' he says.

Mr Bilal Sapuan, 53, is a senior operations executive who has worked at the company for 22 years. He supervises projectionists, the crew who handle the display of images in Cathay cinemas.

He has a unique view of how technology has changed. In the past, film reels would be despatched by motorcycle from one cinema to another elsewhere in Singapore with minutes to spare. Today, when one reel can be looped to serve up to eight multiplex screens at the same time, despatching is no longer necessary, a fact which pleases Mr Bilal.

He shudders when he remembers how traffic mishaps would delay reel delivery. Screens would go blank for up to 30 minutes. But back then, audiences seemed to be more tolerant of mistakes, unlike today, he says.

'Now, patrons will complain if there is a slight delay,' he says.

Another veteran who has seen changes sweep through the business is Mr Chia Lye Huat, 64. The logistics executive has been with the firm for 45 years, having started as an usher and a 'poster boy', the person whose job it was to refresh movie posters in lobbies and hallways, then an essential advertising tool.

Now, he administers the delivery of Cathay-distributed films to the Board Of Film Censors. The current classification system is more complicated than before, but he thinks it makes for a much better viewing experience, compared to the time when all films were edited to fit all ages.

'It was just cut, cut, cut, a lot of movies lost their meaning,' he says.

The head of the company since 1984 is executive director Choo Meileen, niece of co-founder Loke Wan Tho.

In an e-mail interview, the media-shy 50-something boss of Cathay Organisation says that what stands out for her during the 75 years is 'how well Cathay has weathered crises that would have knocked any company out'.

'There are many valuable lessons that I have learnt from them. No Harvard Business School could have taught that,' she says.

Fidelity investment's Lynch urges charity

(BOSTON) Famed investor Peter Lynch, whose knack for picking winning companies helped millions of Americans make fortunes in stocks, is now urging the wealthy to follow his lead anew and give a lot of it back. To charity, that is.
'People who have been much luckier than everyone else should do more of the giving,' Mr Lynch, a vice-chairman at Fidelity Investments and trustee of the Lynch Foundation, said in a telephone interview.
The 66-year-old money manager, who earned his fortune by running Fidelity Investment's Magellan stock fund for more than a decade, is echoing the call to action billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates made only days ago when they urged other billionaires to part with a chunk of their money.
'I hope it makes people think more of giving,' he said of Mr Buffett and Mr Gate's suggestion that other billionaires consider donating half their net worth.
Mr Lynch and his wife, Carolyn, announced on Sunday that they are making a US$20 million donation - their biggest ever - to support a programme to train principals at Boston College, the money manager's alma mater.
In the two decades since retiring from Magellan, Mr Lynch has stuck to what worked best for him - picking common stocks to make his foundation's money grow.
At Fidelity, Mr Lynch turned Magellan fund into a household name and the world's best performing mutual fund by increasing its value 700 times from US$20 million in 1977 to US$14 billion in 1990. Later, he wrote best-selling books that sent generations of Americans into equities.
Known for his shock of white hair and common sense approach to investing, Mr Lynch kept things simple by buying companies whose products he and his family used, like General Electric and the auto company Ford .
He also coined such axioms as 'Behind every stock is a company. Find out what it's doing.' Since retiring from running Magellan where the father of three routinely worked every weekend, Mr Lynch said he has concentrated on investing his foundation's money and mentoring younger analysts and portfolio managers at Fidelity.
'I'm like their older brother,' Mr Lynch said about guiding newcomers at the privately owned mutual fund giant in Boston.
His interest in passing on knowledge is now being spread very tangibly to education, long a favourite cause for Mr Lynch and his wife, who met as students at the University of Pennsylvania.
Discussing the project, Mr Lynch ticked of statistics making him sound exactly like the stock picker whose talent for numbers helped his investors earn a market-beating 29.2 per cent return at Magellan.
'The penalty of being a high school dropout is severe,' he said, laying out the low probability that people who do not finish high school face in finding decent work as the nation's unemployment rate hovers just below 10 per cent.
While Carolyn Lynch - whose father was a high school principal - runs the couple's foundation and searches for worthy causes, it is Peter Lynch's job as head of the investment committee to keep the millions growing.
According to 2008 IRS documents - the year the financial crisis decimated stocks - the Lynch Foundation had US$64 million. Documents for the previous year show US$113 million in 2007.
Over the years, Mr Lynch, who was sometimes seen in the Fidelity offices wearing sandals and holding his dog on a leash, hasn't changed much in the way he picks stocks. 'It is 99 per cent common stocks,' he said about how he invests the foundation's money.
But his frenetic work schedule has slowed over the years.'I don't work on Saturdays anymore,' he said.
Lynch also acknowledged lagging in the technological revolution and joked that his children had to teach him how to use a cell phone.
While sounding still very much like the stock picker he is, Mr Lynch also sounded like the philanthropist he has become in the last two decades. 'We are trying to make a difference where it counts,' he and his wife agreed.
Long ago, the Lynches - who have been married for 42 years - made education their cornerstone cause, supporting programmes like Teach for America and institutions ranging from Harvard Medical School to Marian High School in Framingham, Massachusetts.
The Lynches said they hope the programme to train principals will be duplicated in other cities around the country and eventually help narrow the divide between some of America's top-notch universities and what many call a crumbling public school system. -- Reuters

It's a 'fun' partnership with the kids

IT WENT against the usual learning process, but one of the most valuable lessons Mrs Ng Gim Choo ever received came from her little daughter 25 years ago.
Mrs Ng's first step on this particular learning curve came after she moved to London when her husband was posted to the British capital.
They sent their four-year-old daughter E-Ching to Pembridge Hall, a pre-school near Kensington Gardens, and were stunned at the result.
'She enjoyed going to school every day,' recalled Mrs Ng, 58. 'On weekends she would put on her school uniform and I would tell her that she couldn't go to school, and she would be so disappointed.'
Mrs Ng had never attended kindergarten and her own memories of life in a Chinese education system was that it was 'a pressure cooker, never fun'.
Looking at her daughter's smiling face sparked her curiosity and she became a parent volunteer at Pembridge Hall to see just what was getting E-Ching so excited.
Mrs Ng discovered a whole new educational philosophy, one that saw children's play as a central mode of learning.
Inspired by the British play-based curriculum, Mrs Ng set out to transplant that same fun and nurturing learning environment to pre-schools here when she returned to Singapore.
'At that time, the early years system in Singapore was still very much instructional, very much teacher-directed rather than student-responsive,' said Mrs Ng, who has three children aged 25 to 32.
In 1995, she walked from the kitchen to the boardroom when she opened the first EtonHouse school in Broadrick Road with $500,000 in seed capital from her husband and brother.
The curriculum blends the International Baccalaureate philosophy of inquiry-based learning with the Reggio Emilia approach.
This posits that children have 100 languages with which to communicate their ideas, including drawing, painting, composing, singing and dancing.
Today, the EtonHouse International Education Group operates 26 international schools and pre-schools in Singapore, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia educating 3,000 pupils.
Annual revenue is about $40 million a year.
Singaporeans comprise about 20 per cent to 35 per cent of the pupil mix here.
Fees range between $1,500 and $1,600 a month and a child may have to wait for as long as two years for a place.
One of the schools' key attractions - and reason for its high fees - is the high teacher-pupil ratio, said Mrs Ng.
A pre-nursery class for 18-month-olds has four teachers to a class of 16.
This sort of 'family setting', as Mrs Ng puts it, helps cultivate a personal relationship between teacher and child and allows teachers to tailor lessons to the learning styles of each child.
'We respect children,' said Mrs Ng. 'We look into their interests, and the learning is generated based on each child's interests.'
But parents are not excluded from the relationship either.
'We always say education is a successful partnership among the parents, the teachers and the children.'
EtonHouse schools maintain a strong line of communication with parents through fortnightly newsletters and portfolios for each student.
On top of the bi-annual parent-teacher meetings, the schools also hold student-led conferences once a year.
'Once a year, we turn around and let the children be the teachers, to show their parents how they learn,' said Mrs Ng.
'It's very interesting because you let students take ownership of their learning, and it's also a confidence-booster.'
These initiatives require a lot of preparation by teachers, who have to brief the parents beforehand, tell them to be positive and remind them not to put down their children if they are unable to grasp something that might seem simple.
EtonHouse employs 800 staff globally - with 320 here - of which 70 per cent are teachers.
'It's always a challenge to get good teachers,' said Mrs Ng, who recruited a principal and a few teachers from Britain when she started.
All prospective teachers have to go through a stringent selection process. A degree or diploma in early child education is one requirement.
EtonHouse also has its own teaching academy, the EtonHouse Education Centre (EEC), which focuses on pre-school teacher training, research and professional development.
Four pedagogists, specialists who study how children learn, are based there. They travel the globe to participate in conferences, and then share these research-based best practices with teachers here.
About 10 years ago, EtonHouse began providing primary education at the Broadrick Road main campus, by popular demand from satisfied parents whose children had graduated from the pre-school.
Mrs Ng is now also looking to expand to Britain, America and Australia and even Dubai in the longer term.
'At EtonHouse, we have children from 54 nationalities. We have children of Asian expatriates, we also have children of Western expatriates,' she said.
'We want to go to the West because a lot of our children, after studying at EtonHouse, they went back to America, they went back to Australia, to the UK, and they still missed the EtonHouse experience.'

Father of Swatch dies

Nicolas Hayek, who saved the ailing Swiss watch industry with his plastic timepiece, dies at age 82
New York - Mr Nicolas Hayek, a Lebanese-born business consultant who is widely credited with having saved the Swiss watch industry with the introduction of the Swatch, the inexpensive, plastic - and, as it transpired, highly collectible - wristwatch that made its debut in 1983, died on Monday in Biel, Switzerland. He was 82.
A founder and chairman of the Swatch Group, he died of heart failure while working at the company's headquarters, according to an announcement on the company website.
'Nicolas G. Hayek's greatest merit was his enormous contribution to the saving of the Swiss watch industry and the foundation and the commercial development of the Swatch Group,' the company said in a statement.
The formation of the Swatch Group, which in addition to Swatch today comprises high-end watch brands such as Breguet, Omega, Longines, Tissot, Calvin Klein and Mido, made Mr Hayek one of Switzerland's wealthiest men.
The irony is that the company came about after he was brought in to help shut the foundering Swiss watch industry altogether.
A flamboyant figure with a roguish sense of humour, he was 'a rare phenomenon in Europe - a genuine business celebrity', as The Harvard Business Review described him in 1993.
He was born in Beirut in 1928 and moved to Switzerland as a young man. After studying mathematics, physics and chemistry at the University of Lyon in France, he started a consulting firm, Hayek Engineering, in Zurich in the early 1960s.
By the 1970s, the vaunted Swiss watch industry, a pillar of the national economy for centuries, was in jeopardy.
Japanese watchmakers such as Seiko had begun to undercut Swiss prices. And public tastes were shifting from the finely wrought analogue timepieces in which Swiss artisans had long specialised to the pale flickering faces of mass-market digital watches.
In the early 1980s, with no apparent remedy in sight, a group of Swiss banks asked Mr Hayek to compile a report on how the watch-making industry might best be liquidated. Instead, he merged two of its former titans, the nearly bankrupt Asuag and SSIH, which between them owned brands such as Omega, Longines and Tissot.
He bought a majority stake in the reorganised group, known as SMH - the Societe Suisse de Microelectronique et d'Horlogerie. He was fond of telling interviewers that the initials stood for 'Sa Majeste Hayek' - 'His Royal Highness Hayek'.
In 1983, SMH introduced the Swatch. Lightweight, with vibrantly coloured bands and breezy novelty faces, it was remarkably inexpensive to produce.
It had 51 parts, as opposed to the nearly 100 needed to make a traditional wristwatch. It retailed for less than US$35 when it was first marketed in the United States later that year. The Swatch quickly became a sought-after collector's item worldwide. It was very likely the first time that people had even considered owning multiple watches.
Known to wear up to four timepieces on each arm, Hayek said Swatch produced 'beauty, sensuality, emotionality in watches - and we also produce high-tech on your wrists'.
SMH had produced 100 million Swatches by 1992. The success of Swatch also resuscitated the high-end brands under the SMH umbrella.
In 1998, the company's name was changed to the Swatch Group, taking the name of a brand that had become a pop marketing icon. It generated about US$4.9 billion (S$6.8 billion) in sales last year, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
By redirecting consumers' attention to Swiss watch-making as a whole, the little plastic watch lifted all boats. Even the expensive brands, such as Breguet, 'we will continue to sell - and sell well', Mr Hayek told the publication Swiss News in 2008.
He became a national figure, despite his very un-Swiss flamboyance. In 1998, he came up with the idea for the ultra-compact Smart car, now made by a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler AG.
He stepped down as the Swatch Group's chief executive in 2002 and was succeeded by his son, Nicolas Jr. His daughter Nayla sits on the company's board. He is also survived by his wife Marianne. He remained chairman of the group and head of Breguet.
Over time, the humble Swatch itself was borne upward by its own success: The company has issued limited-edition Swatches designed by noted artists such as Keith Haring.
In 1992, The New York Times reported that a Swatch by Kiki Picasso, a pseudonym of the French artist Christian Chapiron, sold at an auction at Christie's in London for US$28,000.

The envoy and his street-food diplomacy

MR JON Huntsman, widely viewed as one of the most colourful and accessible American ambassadors to China, thinks nothing of hopping onto his Shanghai-built 'Forever' brand bicycle to roam the hutongs of Beijing.
A polished Mandarin-speaker, he banters with locals with ease over breakfast at streetside stalls.
The 50-year-old envoy credits Singapore for helping him build up his street cred.
'I know my food, I'm a street food guy - I was trained in Singapore,' declared Mr Huntsman, whose diplomatic masterstrokes have included connecting with locals through his love of Asian food.
In 1992, he made headlines as the youngest-ever United States ambassador to Singapore at the age of 32. He was an instant hit at his first press conference, speaking in Mandarin and raving about his beloved morning fix of dou jiang (soya bean milk) and you tiao (deep fried dough sticks) from Chinatown.
In Beijing 18 years later, he still heads to the streetside hawkers for his favourite breakfast. His adopted daughters, Gracie Mei, 11, from China, and Asha, four, from India, sometimes accompany him on his rides through the city.
In the 11 months since he arrived in Beijing, Mr Huntsman has covered a lot of new ground, big and small. These include a trip with Gracie Mei to her remote Yangzhou village, to the complexities of engaging with the vast and fast-changing country that is China.
Speaking of the burgeoning scope of US-China relations, Mr Huntsman notes that it has undergone a major turning point.
'We're entering new territory here where neither side has ever gone before,' he told The Straits Times last Thursday at his office located north-east of the Forbidden City. He gave this interview ahead of his speech delivered on Monday at the FutureChina Global Forum held in Singapore, where he was one of the key speakers.
The two powers are 'deep in dialogue' on a wide range of issues, from the global economy to climate change and energy.
'These are all issues that were not part of our bilateral engagement in earlier years,' he said. 'But what marks our relationship today that is quite new and extraordinary is the range of issues that we cover together that go well beyond the bilateral into the global.'
Mr Huntsman may appreciate this evolution better than most, having followed this bilateral relationship since its inception in July 1971, with the establishment of formal diplomatic ties.
At the time, the young Mr Huntsman, then 11, found himself clued into the diplomatic groundwork that paved the way for this historic breakthrough. He had accompanied his father, who was an aide to then President Richard Nixon, to the White House.
While there, he was asked to carry Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's briefcase to a car. When he asked Dr Kissinger where he was going, he was told: 'Please don't tell anyone. I'm going to China.'
Mr Huntsman's childhood fascination with China took him to Taiwan for two years as a Mormon missionary, where he learnt Mandarin and the Hokkien dialect.
In 1984, he made his first visit to China as a member of the advance team preparing for then President Ronald Reagan's visit there and met paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.
He has been back many times since. As deputy US trade representative from 2001 to 2004, he grappled with nettlesome trade disputes over cheap Chinese exports flooding the US market.
But even for a seasoned hand, Mr Huntsman's first winter as ambassador to China was an unequivocably 'turbulent period', marked by disputes such as American arms sales to Taiwan and President Barack Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama.
Those were 'very difficult, dark days', said the diplomat, whose signature Mandarin phrase 'I will learn from you' and mastery of the art of 'giving face' never fail to impress Chinese press and crowds.
But, Mr Huntsman added, 'the question is always how you manage your way through these cycles and how you even out those extremes'.
True enough, 'an extraordinary recovery' kicked in. Around March, both sides came to the realisation that they needed to find common ground and ways of getting along, he recalled.
There was simply too much at stake. 'We relied too much on each other from an economic and trade standpoint,' Mr Huntsman said.
President Hu Jintao's acceptance of Mr Obama's invitation to attend the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in April marked a significant turning point in the relationship.
'The bilateral meeting went not for 60 minutes but for 90 minutes - and neither side pulled out the perfunctory talking points but spoke as friends,' said the ambassador.
This 'wide-ranging discussion... went a long way in mending the relationship'.
The momentum has since picked up. China's recent decision to join the US in reining in Iran's nuclear programme was cited as 'a good example of collaboration between the two sides'.
Another issue to watch is the South China Sea, which has been a source of territorial disputes between China and other Asian countries.
Beijing officially elevated it to one of its 'core interests' of sovereignty, on a par with Tibet and Taiwan this year, according to reports.
China's growing assertiveness in the South China Sea and South-east Asia has prompted Asian leaders like Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew to urge President Obama to step up America's presence in the region in order to 'strike a balance' with the Chinese.
Asked if the US would scale up its presence in the region, Mr Huntsman reiterated the stand that the United States is a 'Pacific power'.
'We care deeply about the free flow of goods and commerce, in other words, keeping the sea lanes open for the free flow of trade.'
The US' significant naval presence has been 'an insurance policy' to ensure stability in the region, he noted.
Mr Huntsman noted that Mr Lee's 'voice registering concerns coming out of South-east Asia is a helpful reminder that South-east Asia is and will always be important to the interests of the US'.
'I can see a future in the years to come, where our engagement will only ramp up, based upon what our needs are as a country and the growing needs of Asean,' he said.
For the present, he is focused on protecting American interests in China. This includes creating jobs for people in the US, where the unemployment rates are 'unacceptably high'.
He noted that China is rebalancing its economy towards a more consumer-based model - and 'that will be good for the US'.
'It will allow for exports to be kicked up, perhaps in an unprecedented way, resulting in greater job creation in the US.'
While some may see this as a political soundbite for a rising star tipped as a potential Republican candidate for the 2016 presidential race, Mr Huntsman does not mince his words when it comes to helping the folks back home: 'From a personal standpoint... every day I'm very mindful of creating jobs, in an enhanced economic relationship with China.'

Goh Keng Swee, the practising economist

Business Times - 16 Jun 2010

IT'S been a month since former deputy premier Goh Keng Swee's passing away. The many eulogies for the great man have offered readers insights into his character and achievements. It is appropriate now to offer a dispassionate assessment of his record as a practising economist in the first decades of Singapore's independence. Praise is quite different from critical review, but our analysis suggests Dr Goh's achievements to have been as significant as many of his eulogists have suggested.
Over the course of his career, Dr Goh contributed in a myriad ways to Singapore's economic development, not to speak of education, defence and the arts. We focus on Dr Goh's policy preferences in three key areas which help explain how and why Singapore has achieved and sustained such a robust growth rate over the past 45 years.
First would be his determined practice of prudent public finance. In light of the spendthrift public policies (and ensuing fiscal meltdowns) in many parts of the world today, we hardly need to justify the importance of prudence on the part of government. But Dr Goh's early advocacy of prudent fiscal and monetary policies - unusual in the 1960s and early 1970s, when state enterprise and neo-Keynesian policies were in vogue around the world - helped to establish a solid macroeconomic base for Singapore's long-term development. As the plain-spoken economist put it in a speech to the Malayan Economic Society in 1966:
'Any small-time grocer in Chinatown can tell you that if you borrow money, unless you intend to abscond, it is prudent to put it to some use which will yield sufficient income to enable you to repay the loan with interest. Somehow or the other, this elementary precept of prudence has been considered to be beneath the dignity of economic planners.'
Second was Dr Goh's early rejection (by 1967) of then-popular strategies promoting import-substituting industrialisation (ISI) in favour of more open, export-oriented development. As the preferred route to development, ISI assumed that protected 'infant' industries would mature and compete in the world market. Alas, the 'infants' never grew up, and ISI proved disappointing (if not disastrous) to almost every country that tried it. Most damagingly, ISI policies led to the entrenchment of business and labour elites focused on protecting domestic monopolies rather than on raising productivity and competing in world export markets. As the record attests, Singapore's export orientation, based on free trade, manifested in part by the country's successful courtship of investments by large multinational corporations (MNCs), experienced great success.
Third was Dr Goh's emphasis on entrepreneurship in the process of economic growth. Few other economists during the 1960s and 1970s saw much of a role for entrepreneurs in their increasingly quantitative models of economic growth. Dr Goh, however, was well versed in the classics of social theory, particularly Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, and appreciated the economic importance of values and culture in determining economic outcomes for both individuals and societies.
Throughout his career, he therefore worked hard to establish public policies that would enable those individuals with values propitious to growth - sobriety, discipline, prudence, vision and an achievement orientation - to have a chance to prosper. He knew instinctively that Singapore needed entrepreneurs, but realised that the state could not create them; the most a state could do was to establish an institutional framework that would foster and support entrepreneurship, whether in individuals or in business entities of one kind or another.
There is nothing startling or original in what we have said. In fact, you can find it all in Adam Smith, who should be regarded as the proper mentor for policymakers in the Third World. Regrettably, many of the Third World policymakers have allowed themselves to be bemused and befuddled by the New Economists.
Dr Goh's pragmatic approach to economic development has been widely remarked upon. Yet, with the lavish praise accorded to the East Asian 'miracle' economies, it has been commonly argued that these examples of successful economic growth support the case of sophisticated government intervention in 'picking winners'. To be sure, Dr Goh envisioned an important role for the state - government promotion of public goods and externalities of one type or another through such institutions as the Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Jurong Town Corporation (JTC) are cases in point.
As importantly, however, he instinctively knew the limits of policy and legislation - what governments could not realistically do. He remarked that government involvement, other than maintaining a conducive investment environment, was not decisive for the 'dragon' economies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore.
In terms of his general theoretical orientation, then, Dr Goh can be measured for the most part as a believer in the efficacy of markets and the private enterprise system. His pragmatic approach to growth arose out of his appreciation of the 'stern realities' of the development process, and respect for the 'harsh school' of experience, distinguishing him from the 'armchair pundits' who advocated purer strains of economic policy. For his 'impurities', everyone in Singapore owes Dr Goh many thanks.