TheEdge Singapore, 7 Feb 2009
ON THE MORNING of Nov 5, as the US Presidential election results were announced on the TV screen, a colleague and I sat in a hotel lobby in Singapore, sipping coffee with Edwin M Truman, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Peterson Institute for International Economics. Truman, a Republican and a former assistant secretary for international affairs of the US Treasury, has in recent years made his name as an authority on sovereign wealth funds (SWFs).
As the TV blared images of Barack Obama and his soaring majority, Truman warmed up to spilling his thoughts on what Singapore’s own funds, Temasek Holdings and GIC, needed to do: They needed to be more open, transparent and accountable to all their stakeholders, not just Singaporeans.
One thing that struck me from the conversation was Truman’s belief that SWFs all over the world would undergo dramatic makeovers as they sought to play a bigger, more different role in the global markets in the aftermath of the current financial crisis. “You will see the two funds here in Singapore change dramatically in coming months and years,” he intoned. Since they were investing outside Singapore, increasingly more of their stakeholders were now overseas with their own unique ground rules, he said. That in itself would be a strong catalyst for transformation.
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