There has been a silent trend taking place this year with wealthy non Thai people living in Thailand. People that have called Thailand home for 20 years and more have been moving their money out and back to their home country as the one thing nobody wants to talk or think about draws ever closer.
For what it is worth, much of Thailand’s stability rides on the status quo remaining the status quo. But as nothing lasts forever there are big unanswered questions of what the next status quo will be like. Will it be non Thai friendly or not is one of the biggest questions. And because discussion of such topics could bring more problems than it is worth, rumors and half answered questions are running amok. So because of that uncertainty, the desire to error on the safe side is underway.
Most of the happening have been with the Indian business community. Collectively the Indian business community is only doing about 25% Thailand investment of what it was doing in years past. However there is also a trend that other countries are investing more being of Chinese influence.
This all speaks of the pending change and each country is reading it in their own way and posturing according to their own best guess what will happen. But when you look at the report, it almost seems like the books are cooked to pump up the numbers.
http://www.boi.go.th/english/download/statistics_foreign_investment/228/FINV108.pdf
But there have been some other changes as well. The political violence has changed investor confidence as well, but that is seen as more short term when compared to the other reason people are re-posturing their portfolios. For the most part there is a year or less of this political infighting remaining, but the other one could easily last a few decades or longer.
Now Connecting the Dots is by no means a financial expert and you would be better off talking to a qualified person who does not work on commission. But we can spot trends in things, and this one for the most part is speaking of the unspeakable without words. There truly is no other significant factors as this is a change based on long term projections. There is also a certain amount of sheep mentality with this trend, but in this case some of these sheep may have the cunning of a fox and the eyes of an Owl.
But in reality this all comes down to each person deciding for themselves, but with only rumors and innuendoes to go on, the right choice becomes awash in a fog. The biggest general concern is Thailand may no longer be known as The Land of Smiles as general social behavior is likely to change once the new status quo becomes active. Many Thais draw their internal strength from Buddhism and the status quo. Should one change it would have the same effect as alcohol does by changing a persons personality as well as moral and ethical behavior.
With changes like that it becomes easy to see the real possibility of change in the negative direction. There is already a significant number of hoops foreigners must jump thru that Thais do not. The concern is it could end up looking like an exercise wheel that a pet rodent would have.
