Well I decided to go to the National Day Celebrations today... held at Zouk. ZOUK!! I wouldn't be surprised if Raffles makes the papers tomorrow: Top Bishan JC goes clubbing for National Day.

(I forgot to put the memory card into my camera so these are phone photos. I spent the entire bus journey home trying to prise out the micro-SD card from my phone headphone slot, then I realized it's only in the headphone slot for my old phone)

I love singing our National Day songs. The nice ones seem to be able to evoke irrational nationalistic sentiments. I say irrational not because this is bad, but because normally I'm not particularly nationalistic. Well, it turns out its quite fun to jump up and down to NDP songs :), especially some favourties like

Home
We Will Get There
Where I Belong
Count On Me Singapore
We Are Singapore
One People, One Nation, One Singapore
Stand Up For Singapore
One United People
Reach Out For The Skies

Okay that's like nearly all of them BUT STILL I love National Day when it rolls around because of the songs. No, I don't think there's anything wrong with going high on like shouting WHERE I BELONG, WHERE I KEEP MY HEART AND SOUL with at least 700 other people. Mass singing ftw, even if I sing like a few pitches off nobody can hear me :D.

And yeah there's the parade and all, but the only part I really watch is the after-parade concert. Weird, huh, that my nationalistic fervour is only confined to nice songs. Probably tells you that it's all superficial and fake and wouldn't hold up if Singapore was being invaded or something. Or something.

Midway through the celebrations one of the DJs decided to rickroll, and there came a

BABY BABY BABY OOOHHHH
LIKE
BABY BABY BABY NOOOOO

Thanks to all the classmates who were jumping and swaying around me :)... I didn't feel that loser after all coming here.

And there was free food! And punch! And I can say that ZOUK HAS FANTASTIC DOUGHNUTS!!!

Their meatballs tasted like fishballs though. But in the dark they could've been fishballs that I mistook for meatballs so they might have been perfectly normal.

Ah well I'll never have another National Day Celebration like this again, so I have no regrets about going there. Was a blast.

And I got to visit Zouk! Underage, but my first nightclub! Without the clubbing. Or alcohol.

lala FFOTD

[ECONS] The central banks of most countries have a regulation in place called the cash reserves ratio, or the reserves requirement, which dictates the minimum percentage of customers' savings that must be kept in the bank.

For instance, if the ratio is 10%, then for every $100 saved by a Consumer A, $10 must be stored in the bank vault, while $90 goes to the loanable funds of a bank. This $90 can then be lent out to other consumers as well as firms at an interest rate, such that the money can be used to generate more money through the interest rate, which then goes to paying the original Consumer A his due interest on his $100 savings. The $10 saved in the bank is the cushion against any risks to the banks; if the bank loses money, Customer A is offered some measure of returns (though $10 seems really little if he saved $100).

Altering the cash reserves ratio is in fact a form of monetary policy because if the central bank were to increase the ratio, say 10% to 20%, commercial banks would have less loanable funds. Now, only $80 of Customer A's $100 can be loaned, so the money supply of the country decreases. Supply curve of money shifts left, thus (draw the graph yourself) interest rates increase, thus consumers and firms are discouraged from consuming (C) and investing (I), so AD shifts left, multiplier, NY blah blah blah. Thus increasing cash reserves ratio is a contractionary monetary policy. Vice versa, decreasing cash reserves ratio would be an expansionary monetary policy.

Decreasing cash reserves ratio is easy, because it means the banks can just take out more from its vault and lend. Increasing cash reserves ratio is harder; banks need to recall any due debts or buy currency in order to get more money and store it in their vault, thus fulfilling their required cash reserves.

Not in syllabus, but good to know.

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