Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing whether or not the Thai economy is sort of rudderless. Now just a little background. Thailand is kind of going through a little bit of tumultuousness politically in the Parliament as it is being hashed out who is going to be the next Prime Minister. I am not really keen to get into that on this channel; this channel is a non-political sort of forum. We talk mostly about legal news, expat news, business news here in Thailand but suffice it to say that is kind of the background for what is going on here.

Just on a personal note, I remember back in the '90s this trend starting of conflating politics with the economy. I noticed this as a kid back in the United States that it seemed like out of coming out of the '80s; in the 80s people knew that the economy was the economy, and politics was politics. Now politicians can have an impact on economy usually to its detriment but politics is not the economy; politics doesn't nor should it drive the economy. The economy does its thing and in my opinion we should all kind of hope politicians just stay the heck out of it. Quite honestly, the best example of this, catastrophically the best example of this happening in the negative, sort of this idea conceptually was COVID where a bunch of politicians got together and I say that knowingly. Yes, so-called medical professionals but you go back and look at that and I made the videos at the time, you have got to really wonder if those folks could truly be considered medical professionals especially pertaining to the subject matter at hand or whether they were political operatives basically trying to promulgate a narrative. Leaving that aside, that was the perfect example of where politics and the economy ‘ne'er the twain should have met’, because the politicians unilaterally decided to shut down the economy and what did that leave us with? It left us with no economy which helped not a lot of people. So every time I see these ongoing publications where they sort of say "oh well Thailand's in real trouble because politically it's going to affect their economy". Honestly, I could make an argument that not having a formed government probably operates to the economy's benefit, not to its detriment because politics gets out of the way of people being able to do business. That being said, it's my personal philosophy. 

So going ahead, and I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: British pound breaches 45 Baht barrier. Now again, the thrust of what I am talking about is very different than the thrust of this article so I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that article in detail, but quoting directly: "Meanwhile the Thai Baht is suffering from the failure of the 8-party coalition, led by the Move Forward Party, to take political power in Thailand with ongoing threat of prolonged civil strife. Additionally, Thai exports have been dropping in the last few months as part of a slowdown in the economy as a whole. At present, the Thai economy is rudderless as the military backed government of General Prayut Chan-o-cha has been in caretaker mode since the general election of May 14th." 

I guess reasonable people can disagree on whether the economy is rudderless. My take on it is that "hey the economy never had somebody holding the rudder anyway, arguably". The economy is the economy, it does what it does especially in a free market and Thailand is very much a free market economy and things tend to happen organically. It's kind of an emergent process and it has emergent properties. In fact I would even argue, whatever rudder we have had the last 5 years was not particularly good for the economy, again because two and a half of those five years the entire economy was shut down because the guy who had the hand on the rudder said we need to shut it down. That resulted in what for the economy? A net zero! We saw what? A literally decimation of the tourism sector here in Thailand. And I say that specifically. I think going back, I think it was 2021, maybe January 2022 we quoted an article from the Bangkok Post where it literally showed that statistically, 90% of the tourism sector was wiped out again because the "rudder" being used was resulting in the entire sector being shut down. So when folks talk about this 'rudderlessness' of the Thai economy, it makes me a little uneasy because it stems from this conflation between the political sphere and the economic sphere and it also seems to overlook the fact that when somebody had their hand on the rudder, especially in the past couple of years, what do they do with it? They operated to just basically shut down that economy.