nakatago wrote: It may serve as a stop gap during financial weakness. O&G may be going away but it's not happening that fast. At least not in the next 3 years or so.
The only difference between finance and O&G is that O&G knows its days are numbers albeit it doesn't know how many days.
Singapore has the problem it keeps turning bad news into good, preserving the idea that all is not as bad as it could be. A drop of 30% in the sale of private flats for example, still brings out the same old lines about 'safe bet', 'more people coming', 'it's not as bad as it appears as prices are still looking to go up', blah, blah, blah.
The local population is lulled into a sense of security that makes the bubble worse, with more dramatic issues if/when it eventually does fail.