As someone who has personally run into problems with being honest at the office, I find this to be an interesting story on more than one level.
One one level, we talk about honesty as a virtue but there is always a lot of controversy about being honest in the workplace. Honesty is a virtue, just dont tell the truth. This is doubly true in democracies around the globe that dont have much in the way of a "free" press.
On another level, I read this story and wonder how much of our economic "foundation" is based on lies and misinformation. Is there really a solid foundation down there somewhere or is the whole game a quicksand confidence game?
Morgan Stanley Star Exits After an Email Leak
Asia Economist's Note Contained Comments That Criticized Singapore
October 5, 2006
HONG KONG -- Morgan Stanley's star Asia economist thought he could opine freely among his own colleagues. He was wrong.
The sudden departure of Andy Xie from the investment bank Friday was precipitated by the leak of an internal email he wrote Sept. 18 containing disparaging comments about Singapore. The nine-paragraph note, with the subject line "Observations at the IMF/WB Conference (internal)," included an account of a private dinner hosted by Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, during the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings last month.
"I thought that the questioners were competing with each other to praise Singapore as the success story of globalization," he wrote, according to a copy of the email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Morgan Stanley. In contrast, he cited "money laundering" as responsible for Singapore's success. "These western people didn't know what they were talking about," he wrote.
"When I write something for the public eye, I choose the wording carefully," Mr. Xie said. But he added: "Nothing I write, in private or in public, will ever contradict each other."The incident underscores the problem analysts, strategists and economists at big firms can face in expressing their opinions without offending their employers' clients. Earlier this year, Ernst & Young LLP, one of the Big Four accounting firms, retracted a report estimating that bad loans in China were five times the publicly disclosed numbers, after drawing an indirect rebuke from the country's central bank. The accounting firm is the auditor of the nation's biggest bank, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., or ICBC. Ernst & Young said the estimate was erroneous.
In Singapore, too, the government is wary of public criticism -- for example, prohibiting outdoor demonstrations. The nation's ruling-party leaders have brought defamation lawsuits against several opposition politicians and a number of publications. They have cited the need to protect their reputations from slander.
The bespectacled Mr. Xie, who has a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made a name for himself with a provocative and chatty style that melded personal anecdotes with economic opinions. He has written extensively about the property market in his native Shanghai. He argued that the surge in prices wasn't caused by underlying Chinese growth but was propped up by overseas Chinese investors.
