General

Komuniti Tukang Jahit is an accredited social enterprise that wants to empower B40 Malaysian women, which include single mothers, single women, underprivileged women, stay at home mothers and even the OKU group. And they do that by training and providing job opportunities to these women as they work from home. They focus on making mostly making corporate gifts, customised sewn items or even tourist souvenirs. They sit down with us as they share the true story behind running a social enterprise that no one talks about.

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Philip See speaks to Tom Westbrook, Chief Correspondent, Asia Markets from Reuters on all the biggest business stories of 2022.

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The Umno General Assembly concluded last Saturday where nearly 3,000 delegates convened and heard from party leaders on the future direction of the party. The biggest development was the passing of a resolution to not have the party’s top two positions open for contest in its upcoming election. But will this sit well with the grassroots and can this party recover from their poor performance at GE15. Dr Bridget Welsh, Honorary Research Associate, Asia Research Centre, University of Nottingham Malaysia gives us her views.

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2022 was a disastrous year for many asset classes driven by an aggressive interest rate cycle by the Fed and also the Russia Ukraine war. Mark Mobius who is known as “the Godfather of Emerging Markets” will be looking into his crystal ball and giving his insights on many asset classes - stocks, bonds, cryptos, property and what is the right investment strategy to take. Prior to launching Mobius Capital Partners in 2018, Mark served as executive chairman of Franklin Templeton Investments’ emerging markets group.

The Malaysian government said it may consider a ban on exporting palm oil to the EU in response to the bloc’s latest law

which bans imports of grown on deforested land including palm oil and its derivatives. Dr. Sathia Varqa, co-founder, Palm Oil Analytics tells us what this means for CPO prices and will such a ban work.

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2022 was the era of the King Dollar led by the aggressive rate hiking cycle of 425 bps by the Fed. But there are expectations of the Fed being at the tail end of its hiking cycle and also supported by the modest inflation print for December. The Bloomberg dollar index is down 2% YTD. With this, we have seen Asia currencies appreciate across the board. What does this mean for the global currency outlook in 2023? For answers we speak to Jeff Ng, Senior Currency Analyst, MUFG.

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Global equity markets and also in the US are off to a great start in 2023. This was partly driven by the more modest US CPI print for December. But should investors exercise caution especially when earnings season has kicked off. A key a concern would be declining profit margins which may lead to compression of valuation multiples. For insights, we speak to Kingsley Jones, Chief Investment Officer, Jevons Global.

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Patrick Teoh takes you on another foot-stomping, hand-clapping ride down memory lane as he blows dust off his vinyl collection to bring you a selection of hits from the 60s to 80s.

Join Othniel Ting & Daryl Ong as they delve into an album of our chosen artist of the week, running you through the stories & history of the album track by track. This week, we're celebrating the 54th anniversary of English rock band Led Zeppelin's self titled debut album.

The conversation on A Bit of Culture in this episode revolves around martial arts, data privacy and leadership, with BFM producer Michael Gong kicking off the conversation by reflecting on the evolution of martial arts from being a practice that’s violent, to one that’s now perceived as a form of art. Kam then reflects on the attitude people his age have towards data privacy. Are they more particular about it, or less? In the second part of the show, Azmyl Yunor ponders how leadership has changed these days to be more about making deals, rather than actually leading.