Yesterday, Brunei Times (BT) carried an article about a consortium of Japanese oil firms, planning to invest 700 to 800 billion Yen in developing a large scale natural gas project in Brunei.
I purposely highlighted the numbers because I want the readers to understand the meaning of it.
As majority of you quite aware, Yen is not acceptable in Brunei. Furthermore, Yen is a fiat currency created by the Japanese Government. It is not being backed up with Mount Fuji. It is just a piece of paper or computer bits. And yet we are accepting them without question and stand ready to commit our resources for the Japanese people.
This so called investment is intriguing and prompt the question, what is wrong with Brunei dollar? Is it not good enough for investment? If it is not good enough, then why bother creating Brunei dollar in the first place?
Please note that I am not being negative about the so called investment. However, I am concern with the notion or mentality of some people that we need foreign currencies to develop Brunei. Furthermore, we are undermining our resources for other people prosperity.
Our oil and gas is a finite resources and not renewable. Imagine if we were to runs out of them, what should we do then? Sell our soul next?
From my perspective, going to work to produce real goods and services, to export for someone else to consume does no economic good at all, unless we get to import and consume the real goods and services others produce in return. Put more succinctly, The real wealth of a nation is all it produces and keep itself, plus all imports, minus what it must export.
Think about it....
