SINGAPORE: On Friday , Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke about what lies ahead for Singapore amid the COVID-19 pandemic. He also addressed questions from the media in a doorstop interview.I wanted to have a chance to talk to you because we had the Resilience Budget yesterday – it was a very major package. I wanted to give you my take on the situation and why we did this and what lies ahead.
You see it in America, taking off now. Now the American numbers I think have exceeded or are about to exceed the Chinese numbers, and still increasing rapidly in places like New York State, on the West Coast. It is a crisis situation. In Chinese they say 一 one wave not settled, the next wave has come. This is not the last wave, because you look at other countries in the region who are very worried.
All around the world that is happening, that hits us, and in Singapore, it hits us particularly hard because we are so dependent on trade and our industries like aviation, tourism, travel, hotel, I mean business has gone to zero. SIA’s business had gone down by 96%. It has come to a halt. This is not going to go away in a hurry, because we are protecting our borders until everything calms down. Other countries are doing that.
Within one month, we have the supplementary budget, which for these pieces, are four, five six times bigger than the original February budget. But it is necessary and we have the dry powder. If we need to do more, when we need to do more, we will do that down the road.
We have tapped from the reserves for this package - $17 billion. The total amount of reserves, that we do not publish but we have much more than that, and it will see us through for quite a long time. It is just as well that we have not gone and listen to the people who said to us - you do not need so much, why are you saving all this money, just touch it and we will be all right. But, we kept it aside.
I think that we have to work hard to find ways to redeploy the people who are inevitably going to be at the very least under-employed during this period. You are talking about tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. The Americans, they had one estimate that they think, I do not know whether he meant it seriously, but this was a member of the Fed who said 30% unemployment.
I decided that if she wrote to me so seriously, I should write her a proper reply and I explained to her why it was, that actually schools can be safe places, and schools actually provide a very important service, which helps the kids and helps their parents. If you do not have them open, it does not mean that your problem has gone away, because where do the kids go?
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