[GCA10]

OP's critique feels like a celebrity economist's variant of those travel magazine pieces that tell us why Zermatt, Phuket or Nantucket is no longer a "cool" vacation spot. On some sort of momentary buzz meter, sure.

But the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no? Worrying about whether a couple dozen X/Twitter legends are hyping you today feels silly.

[notahacker]

Think it's more looking at the trend for Very Serious Political/Economic Commentators to suggest it as a model to emulate in long form articles than the Twitterati, but yeah, it's explicitly asking about opinions rather than whether there's anything about it that's actually broken down. Which is, relatively speaking, a nice place to be as a country.

Cowen is focused mostly on the US commenteriat, but the trend is similar in the UK, where "we should totally be like Singapore" peaked around Brexit, under the delusion idea that all we needed to do to emulated the success of the city state that founded ASEAN two years after declaring independence was leave the EU.

Meanwhile HN generally forms its opinion from a decades-old William Gibson article lamenting that it wasn't cool enough to write cyberpunk about :)

[alephnerd]

> celebrity economist's

That is what MarginalRevolution is. It's fairly heterodox by most standards, but not in the good way.

> the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no

Nope.

If I can now IPO in China or India with Singapore level valuations and attract Singapore level deal sizes, why would I as a Chinese or Indian want to dedicate significant capital in Singapore beyond what is needed to build an operating shell to interface with western capital markets?

Similarly, if I'm GS, JPMC, Citadel, etc and I'm seeing significant dealflows in China and India, I should concentrate on building an organization within their borders as much as possible - which is what they have been doing since the mid-2010s.

Singapore will remain a major financial hub, but it is losing it's relative advantage to other hubs within Asia.

[tim333]

India and China don't have the low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has. In some ways it's advantage has increased now Hong Kong is part of China.

[alephnerd]

> low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has

I can say from personal professional experience that historically businesses are domiciled in Singapore primarily for us investors in Western capital markets to enter China, India, and ASEAN.

For capital that is already located in China, India, and parts of ASEAN (primarily Vietnam), that becomes less attractive, especially because China, India, and Vietnam all operate SEZs that have aligned with western corporate law or have BITs signed with major western financial hubs (eg. Pudong SEZ, GIFT City SEZ), so we don't need to route via SG to the same degree we did 20 years ago.

Additionally, if we want to exit our investments in China or India, we have no choice but to list on a Chinese (including Hong Kong) or Indian stock exchange because no other Asian market has comparable trade volume, which makes exits difficult.

Finally, what differentiates Singapore from the Dubai or London? Depending on where you are investing in Asia, you may end up getting much more preferential access from either of those two instead of Singapore.

This is why Singapore has lost it's mojo - it can't differentiate itself as a financial services center and Singapore never really had a strong innovation sector.