This article first appeared in Personal Wealth, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on Feb 8 - 14, 2016.

In the spirit of the Lunar Year of the Fire Monkey, Personal Wealth looks back on the last 12 years, highlighting the key events that helped shape today’s global economic and investing landscape.

2014
Wood Horse  

The Year of the Wood Horse was predicted to be one mired in instability, natural disasters and epidemics. Eerily enough, the event that flooded the front pages across the globe was the Ebola outbreak. The epidemic is said to have killed five times more people than all other known Ebola outbreaks combined. It has since taken the lives of 11,315 people in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, the US and Mali. 

While much of the African continent was reeling from the Ebola catastrophe, protest rallies in Hong Kong sent ripples across Asian economies as many feared unrest could affect Hong Kong’s status as an offshore renminbi centre. Thousands of protestors took to the streets of the former British colony over several months, demanding greater transparency and a freer election process. The protest rally, famously known as the “Umbrella Movement”, eventually culminated in 800,000 citizens calling for a referendum to allow them to select their own leaders without Beijing’s influence. At the peak of the unrest, the Hang Seng Index dipped 1.9%.

Europe was not spared from the upheavals as the battle for Crimea came to full tilt after Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych was driven from power by violent protests in Kiev. In what was dubbed the worst crisis in the region since the Cold War, Russian forces seized control of the Crimean peninsula and soon after, the citizens of Crimea voted to join Russia in a referendum that has yet to be recognised by Ukraine and the Western powers. 

Malaysia unwittingly became part of the melee when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down on July 17 over rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 aboard. Less than five months before the tragedy, the national carrier was plunged into a crisis when flight MH370, en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, disappeared with 239 passengers and crew on board. The double tragedy left the loss-making airline in a lurch. Khazanah Nasional Bhd, which had a 70% stake in Malaysian Airline System Bhd, put in place a restructuring plan, which among others, involved slashing its workforce by at least 6,000. 

Bad news is said to come in threes; just a few days before the end of the year, the Indonesian AirAsia flight 8501 crashed into the Java Sea during bad weather, killing all 155 passengers and seven crew on board.

Barely a year after GE13, Pakatan Rakyat’s already fragile ties began to unravel as PKR-led Selangor sought to overthrow then menteri besar Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim in January. The orchestrated “Kajang Move” left the most industrialised state in the country in chaos for most of the year as PKR wanted to replace Khalid with its de facto leader, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim. The party’s plan hit a brick wall after Anwar, 68, was found guilty by the Court of Appeal and sentenced to a five-year jail term on charges of sodomy. 

His wife and PKR president Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail stood in the Kajang by-election and defeated Barisan Nasional’s Datin Paduka Chew Mei Fun with a 5,379-vote majority. The party’s plan was scourged again when Wan Azizah’s nomination for menteri besar was not approved. She was then replaced by Bukit Antarabangsa assemblyman Azmin Ali in September. Subsequent tiffs between DAP, PKR and Pas saw the end of the Pakatan Rakyat alliance, which was formed in 2007.

Despite all this, Malaysia’s economy once again outstripped global growth by 6% to 2.57%. The country’s inflation rate remained relatively moderate at 2.5%. The ringgit continued to depreciate against the US dollar, ending the year at 3.50. The stock market fell, with the KLCI ending the year 6% lower at 1,761.25 points.

2015
Wood Goat

This was the year everyone knew that the party was well and truly over. The goat lumbered and stumbled along its rutted path, leaving mess and chaos in its wake. Low oil prices (US$30 in the final months of 2015); the Goods and Services Tax (GST) introduced in April, which effectively put paid to an already weak retail sector; weakening demand from China, of which the insatiable appetite for goods and commodities had sustained the world economy since the global financial crisis; and the fallout from the 1Malaysia Development Bhd scandal proved to be too toxic a cocktail for even the “eat anything in sight” goat to swallow.

The stock market fell for the second year in a row, this time 4% to 1,692.51 points from 1,761.25 the year before, while the ringgit plunged to a 17-year low, depreciating from 3.50 to the US dollar at end-2014 to 4.29 — a level not seen since the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis. It was doubly hit by domestic issues such as the 1MDB scandal, which weakened investor confidence in the country, and low crude oil prices. The ringgit was Asia’s worst-performing currency and one of the world’s worst performing currencies. Crude palm oil prices took a beating as well, but not as badly as crude oil, declining 4.2% from RM2,297 to RM2,200 per tonne. But despite this, the country recorded 5.1% real GDP growth in 2015 while the Consumer Price Index was up 2.1%. 

GST was introduced in April, effectively constricting the retail sector. From January to September, retail sales only grew about 1%, a situation that was exacerbated by the falling ringgit and higher cost of doing business.

The economy aside, it was an eventful, if tumultuous year. An earthquake measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale hit Sabah, effectively destroying the iconic Donkey’s Ear Peak on Mount Kinabalu and claiming at least 19 lives.

It was also a year of massive job cuts across the board. The most visible company to slash jobs was Malaysia Airlines, which cut 6,000 jobs. There were also massive job cuts in the banking and technology sectors. 

In July, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak reshuffled his Cabinet, replacing his deputy Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin with Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. All in, seven new ministers and deputy ministers were appointed. A month later, disgruntled citizens took to the streets for the fourth Bersih rally to protest this, among other things.

Internationally, the situation was no more peaceful. Beijing devalued its currency to remain competitive, three teams of Islamic State terrorists struck at four locations in Paris, killing 130 people, and the world was hit by a crisis of unprecedented proportions as more than a million refugees got into boats to escape wars or persecution in their respective countries. China decided to abandon its one-child policy for a two-child one and after seven years of negotiations, the US and 11 other countries finally reached agreement in October over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the largest regional trade agreement in history.

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