Singapore Confident to Deal with Current Global Economic Slowdown

Singapore is confident to sail through the rough patch of slower economic growth this year as the city state has the right fundamentals, a government minister said on Sunday.

Our confidence in Singapore is very high. Across the board, manufacturing, services, people are confident about Singapore. Our property market is not as overvalued as many other countries including some others in Asia. We have a strong fiscal system. It's just as well we didn't spend all our surplus last year. We were conservative. We preserved some for the future and that's the right approach, Finance Minister Thurman Shanmugaratnam was quoted as saying by local Channel NewsAsia reports.

The minister assured Singaporeans that the country's banks are well regulated and there is no risk and no reason whatsoever to have a run on the country's banks.

More importantly, the banks themselves have good risk management. So frankly, you need not worry about how solid our banks are, your money is safe. We are not in the same situation as the United States, we need not panic, he said.

The minister said that Singaporeans can have the same confidence in insurance companies which also have to abide by strict regulations.

However, he admitted that the global economic slowdown can have impact upon Singapore's job market.

As for the 700 billion U.S. dollars rescue plan passed by American lawmakers to save the country's financial institutions, the minister said that the United States needs to do more to solve the lingering crisis.

In August, Singapore lowered its full-year economic growth forecast this year to between 4 percent and 5 percent from an earlier estimate of between 4 percent and 6 percent.