Budget 2027: Can Growth Outrun Subsidy?

A pre-Budget framework for assessing growth, fiscal discipline and the cost of protecting households.

The arithmetic facing Budget 2027, to be tabled today, is simple but uncomfortable. Malaysia’s economy grew by 5.7% in the first half of 2026, while the government continues to grapple with high public debt and an unexpectedly large fuel subsidy bill.

Yet there is a reason for cautious optimism. The World Bank has raised its forecast for Malaysia’s 2026 economic growth from 4.4% to 5.1%, reflecting stronger-than-expected performance. This gives the government some breathing space. The question is whether stronger growth can help restore fiscal discipline without weakening support for households.

Three competing priorities define this Budget: growth, debt consolidation and the cost of living.

Click Here to Read More..

Budget Day? I’ll Read About It Tomorrow

I confess. I have stopped watching the live Budget presentation.

Not because I have lost interest in the country's finances. Quite the opposite. I have probably become more interested in what lies behind the numbers. But after years of watching Budget Day unfold, I have discovered a more efficient way of doing it: read the newspaper the next morning.

By then, the numbers have been digested, the important announcements separated from the decorative language, and someone has usually produced a useful table telling me what the Budget actually means for my pocket.

The Government's version will have been delivered. The coalition MPs will have praised it. The Opposition will have criticised it. Somewhere in between, someone will have discovered a number that appears to have been overlooked, misrepresented or interpreted differently.

And then comes the familiar political choreography.

Click Here to Read More..

When Bankers Become Power Brokers

The Uncanny Parallel Between J.P. Morgan and Tun Daim

History occasionally produces two men separated by an ocean, a century and vastly different political systems, yet connected by an intriguing similarity: both understood that the power of banking extended far beyond money.

J. Pierpont Morgan was born in 1837, when the United States was still transforming from an agrarian society into an industrial power. Tun Daim Zainuddin was born exactly a century later, when Malaya was still a developing colonial economy. Yet both would eventually operate at moments when their countries were undergoing profound economic transformation.

The comparison is not to suggest that Daim was simply a Malaysian J.P. Morgan. Their circumstances were fundamentally different. Morgan was a private financier whose influence grew through Wall Street. Daim, although a businessman with substantial banking interests, eventually became Finance Minister and therefore possessed something Morgan never did have direct access to the machinery of government.

That difference may be precisely what makes the comparison so fascinating.

Click Here to Read More..