(Petaling Jaya, Monday): The DAP leadership will seek a meeting with the Special Functions Minister and National Economic Action Council (NEAC) Executive Director, Tun Daim Zainuddin to find out what are the "signs" of an economic recovery at the end of the year and to offer full DAP co-operation in confidence-restoration to overcome the worst economic crisis in Malaysian history.
Daim said in Sungai Petani on Friday that "positive signs of an economic recovery have been seen in the past weeks with prospects of the economy improving further towards the end of the year".
It would appear that even the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who has begun to talk about "shocking measures" to overcome the national economic crisis, was also unaware of these "positive signs of an economic recovery" at the end of the year, prompting him to say that he would be seeking clarification from Daim.
Daim should not only inform the Prime Minister of these "positive signs" of an economic recovery at the end of the year, but to tell the nation and people as well, so that all these good news could be shared by the people who are very hard up of good economic news in the past 14 months.
The country was gripped with a bleaker economic prospect scenario since the public release of the National Economic Recovery Plan (NERP) by Daim a month ago on July 23, which had failed to stimulate market confidence with the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE) Composite Index (CI) falling by some 100 points.
Today, the NERP was put on sale one month after it had been made public - which did not help in anyway in confidence restoration.
Before 3 p.m. today, the KLSE CI crashed to the all-time low of 308.61 points, or 15.45 points lower than Friday’s close of trading - placing the KLSE CI dangerously close to crash through another psychological barrier of below 300 points while the ringging had weakened to the 4.23 band against the US dollar.
(24/8/98)