Najib: No winning being PM

“When you become PM, for example the price of petrol goes up, you get the blame; but when the price of petrol goes down, they say it’s market forces.

“So you never really win,” he told the audience when delivering the closing address at the Khazanah Megatrends Forum today.

He also said it was difficult to convince the public of Putrajaya’s measures to mitigate a global economic slowdown, despite the same issue affecting superpowers such as China and the US.

This was especially given Putrajaya’s inability to replicate the measures used to navigate the 2008 global financial crisis, he said, when it was able to pump in tens of billions in stimulus.

“This limitation is due to our goal to reduce our fiscal deficit and our sovereign debt levels. And fiscal deficit and sometimes trying to get understanding from the rakyat is a huge challenge sometimes almost a losing battle,” he added.Najib who is also finance minister, explained that Malaysia’s economy was being affected by developments elsewhere, such as the devaluation of the Chinese Yuan as well as the expected interest rate hike by the US Federal Reserve.

A global commodities crash since last year has also hurt the income of oil-exporting Malaysia, forcing Putrajaya to revise its Budget for 2015 less than three months after tabling it last October.

“Never before in our history have so many such external events occurs all at once.
They have had an effect on our economy, with a slight down tick in growth- below the 5 per cent to 6 per cent growth path that we envisioned- and a depreciating Ringgit,” he explained.

Malaysia’s economy grew 5 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter, the slowest pace since two years ago, and that the main stock index has dropped by around 7.5 per cent since the start of the year.

The ringgit has fallen nearly 30 per cent against the US dollar in that time.
Najib is due to table the Budget for 2016 next week.

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