The ringgit has been on a depreciating trend versus the US dollar since early April 2022. While it is natural for Malaysians to focus on the ringgit, the depreciation is best explained by the strengthening of the US dollar against a slew of other currencies. Global events are triggering capital to head to the US, leaving other economies having to deal with the repercussions of such capital flight. But this fact does not stop Malaysians from calling domestic authorities to do something about the depreciation. Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed recommends Malaysia pegs the ringgit as the country once did.
This is where Wong Sulong’s Notes to the Prime Minister: The Untold Story of How Malaysia Beat the Currency Speculators might be useful in providing greater details how pegging and capital control of the 1990s came about.
Unfortunately, the book does not do the job very well by digressing too much.
The book is firstly a reproduction of notes Nor Mohamed Yakcop wrote for the Mahathir at the heights of the crisis. Nor Mohamed is the architect behind the pegging and possibly the brain behind the rebuilding of Malaysia post-Asia Financial Crisis.
Secondly, it is an unexpected festschrift-like tangent in honor of the man, written by men and women (themselves had, and have, big roles in corporate Malaysia post-1998) Nor Mohamed recruited to head various government bodies and companies.
While the notes are useful and enlightening, the book is deficient in a way the notes are ill-supported by context-making commentaries. Because of the structure, the book makes a disorienting read, which leaves me dissatisfied.
When I bought the book some time back, I had expected it would discuss how Malaysia came to the decisions it made, and how the debates among those in power went. Furthermore, given the book was published more than 10 years after the crisis, possibly a critical review of the pegging and capital control.
There is no critical review. When I write critical, I do not mean criticizing the actions. Rather, I expect an examination why the policy worked for Malaysia. What we have instead is assertion that it worked and everybody else in the world was wrong.
Debates had around the various policies advocated by Nor Mohamed through notes are totally absent. A reader would need prior and outside knowledge of the economic and political environment of the 1990s to truly comprehend the reasons and tensions behind the notes. For instance, Nor Mohamed in his letters to Mahathir here and there criticized decisions taken by the Finance Ministry and the central bank, both of which were responsible to the then Finance Minister, Anwar Ibrahim. But Wong Sulong left the tensions largely out. I did not expect a full political analysis of tensions between Mahathir and Anwar, but I think it would be reasonable to expect an exploration of policy difference between the two men in response to the Asian Financial Crisis.
This makes me feel reading the book a little like reading Malaysian newspapers in the 1990s and the 2000s. Journalists during those decades (sometimes, even now) liked to write about the government’s reply to an issue, but not the issue itself. Imagine the government saying “everybody is alright” in response to a major vehicular accident, but that accident is not mentioned at all. The public of that era would have to guess what the government was referring to. Reading Notes to the Prime Minister is a little bit like that: frustrating. Annoying even.
Nor Mohamed proposed multiple policies in his notes, but readers are left to guess whether the policies were adopted. This is yet another example how the Wong leaves the notes uncontextualized.
My frustration grows further when in the chapters following the ‘notes,’ the book goes off tangent to celebrate Nor Mohamad. The man deserves to be celebrated, but the book overly does it by having various then-contemporary corporate captains (several of them are still active) recounting how they met the man and describing the man’s best traits in a festschrift style.
Nevertheless, some of the stories told help readers understand some aspects of government policy in the 2000s. I also become more appreciative how many GLC men and women were Nor Mohamed Yakcop’s men and women. When Najib was at war with Mahathir, and reopened the forex scandal of the 1980s and inevitably found Nor Mohamed as the number one scapegoat, I wonder how these men and women felt. But again, these insights come only frustratingly indirectly.
Finally, the notes themselves are fascinating. I learned one or two things that I took for granted before. I think more importantly, I am just impressed how detail-oriented Nor Mohamed Yakcop was, how knowledgeable he was, and how he was able to explain complex financial transactions in simple terms to the Prime Minister. Very clear-minded.