I have to be a big busybody
Hard data is not the only thing economic forecaster Song Seng Wun uses.
Fri, Nov 07, 2008
The New Paper
By Ng Tze Yong
SOME scrutinise stock market graphs.
Others quibble over decimal points.
| He supports underdog teams
SOME call him Singapore's most visible economist. Others, in jest, call him Mr Rent-A-Quote. Whatever his nickname, they point to the same thing: Mr Song Seng Wun, 48, is one of Singapore's most quoted economists. But just who is the man beneath all that jargon? The Raffles Place crowd knows him as the short guy (1.54m) who walks around in pants one size too big, held up with suspenders. He also wears a straw hat sometimes. But ask him why an economist needs a funky dress sense, and he'd correct you promptly: It's functional, not funky. "If you wear suspenders, it's easy to pee. You unzip, the suspenders hold your pants up, and your hands are free. Then, you just relax, lah," he said. He has 100 suspenders in his wardrobe. "I buy them in Hong Kong because in Singapore, they only have those with clips. I like mine with buttons," he said. The straw hat comes in "because the air-con in the office is too cold and the fluorescent lights too bright." But Mr Song obviously possesses more funk than he cared to admit. His cubicle on the 19th storey of the Singapore Land Tower beside Raffles Place MRT has giant red flowers painted on the walls, corals on the window sill and a magnetic gecko on his office phone. It's not Bloomberg Radio, but K-pop, which plays in the background. His desktop background is a poster from the Korean drama serial Jumong. He's a curious English Premier League fan; he supports a different team each year. "I try to predict which team will be the underdog and then I support them. For the past two years, it was Wigan. This year, it's Hull City. "Anyway, I kind of like their team colours of orange and black. Reminds me of Malaysia." Born in Sarawak, educated in New Zealand, he came to Singapore in 1990. He remains a Malaysian. "PR or no PR, it makes no difference to me," he said. His 44-year-old wife is a homemaker and former air stewardess. They have a daughter, 12, and son, 9. Three times a year, Mr Song makes it a point to take them to Sarawak. "I want them to be familiar with kampung life. I don't want them to go 'eeeee' when they see a pond or muddy water," he said. The man may be an oracle to the bankers, but he remains a kampung boy at heart. He has previously kept hamsters, love birds, tarantulas and grass snakes as pets. "But then, I moved into a condominium at Queenstown recently and now wife says cannot," he said. |
Others, still, tune in to industry gossip.
With recession looming, everyone's looking for an answer to the big question: Just how bad will it get?
For Mr Song Seng Wun, however, it's the little clues that matter.
Body postures on the MRT, brand labels and restaurant queues - they may mean nothing to the untrained eye.
But to Mr Song, they are omens of things to come.
Mr Song is an economic forecaster.
In these troubled times, they seem to be the only ones who know what's going on.
The world looks to them for comfort and warnings - hanging on to their every word.
But just how do these modern-day soothsayers work?
'An economic forecaster is a mathematician, historian, psychologist and big kaypoh (busybody), all rolled into one,' said Mr Song.
He has his trusty mathematical equations, spreadsheets and statistics.
But a good economic forecaster, he added, must also be a good detective.
'When I'm on the bus or MRT, I observe people. What are they wearing? Do they look worried? Are they slouching? Is it more crowded these days? Are there more CBD types?' he said.
If you thought economists were boring, old fuddy-duddies, read Mr Song's philosophical take on the work they do: 'We try to smell what is in the wind'.
'I check out the queues at Ikea. I keep fish and plants, so I talk to the chaps at my aquarium shop and nursery to find out if people are still buying tanks and flowers,' he said.
'When I'm at the lingerie shop, I want to find out: Are people buying Triumph or La Perla?'
These are examples of discretionary spending, he explained. They show how optimistic people are feeling about the economy.
He uses many barometers.
'Of course, there may be many reasons for any one observation but if you aggregate it, you get a sense of how people are feeling.'
Having a good feel of the pulse of society helps him when he gets back to the office at CIMB-GK Research, where he's a regional economist.
'We use what we call regression analysis. Basically, it's a 'cheem' word for looking at past economic relationships, finding a pattern and extrapolating it to the future,' he said.
More art than science
But economic forecasters emphasise that it's more an art than a science.
The science is straightforward: It involves examining data such as tourism arrivals, cargo volume and the number of advance orders for goods.
'But it also involves gut feeling because we need to second-guess people's reactions to these things,' said Mr David Cohen, the director of Asian forecasting at Action Economics.
'That's where the art comes in.'
Although hard data, rather than anecdotal evidence, is the main tool of forecasters, accuracy depends on a combination of the two.
'Data is always backward-looking. Observation (of daily life) is real-time,' explained United Overseas Bank economist Ho Woei Chen.
Weeks before the Lehman Brothers collapse, in the lead-up to the Mid-Autumn Festival, Mr Song had a sense of foreboding.
'Last year, companies were sending mooncakes as corporate gifts by the trolleyful,' he said. 'This year, they were sending boxes. The delivery boys even had fingers to spare.'
For him, it was 'a sign that companies were starting to be more careful about spending'.
The financial crisis which hit shortly afterwards threw things into disarray among economic forecasters.
Unusual
'We have had to change our forecasts abruptly in the past few weeks because of the financial crisis, which was such an unusual event,' said Mr PK Basu, chief economist for Asia at Daiwa Institute of Research.
'But even then, the consensus among economic forecasters can differ, as it often does, because different forecasters can interpret the same data differently,' he added.
In times like these, economic forecasters tend to err on the side of pessimism, said Miss Ho.
'The public will be more forgiving (if we are wrong),' she said.
Mr Song agreed that the crisis has made forecasting 'very fuzzy'.
But somewhere deep down, he has a feeling that it isn't as bad as it appears - yet.
It's a judgment that comes from poring over endless data.
But it also comes from another little clue.
Halloween night.
Zouk, he said with a twinkle in his eye, was packed to the nines.
This article was first published in The New Paper on November 05.