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Published on March 21, 2008

I am especially happy to see Central Department Stores use market forces to promote usage of fabric bags, by giving 10-30 per-cent discounts to shoppers who use their own bags from March 23-30. Central will also have eye-catching cloth bags for their clients, to replace the normal plastic or paper ones.

I suggest that other firms should follow these role models and promote usage of cloth bags. In particular, Ireland has shown that using market forces really pays off towards this goal; by charging customers for plastic ones, the Irish have tremendously reduced their usage of such bags. Hopefully, by offering discounts, Central will be equally successful.

Also, as top-tier Western retailers have found out, it pays to give customers a bag of such high quality that it's used time and again. Such a bag is, in effect, a moving signboard for the firm, and is, in itself, a status symbol. Credit-card and other firms might give them free only to their VIP customers, making the bags a status symbol - and who knows, those who copy brand-name handbags now might turn to copying, say, Visa Platinum fabric bags instead!

Do your bit to combat litter and "go green": switch to fabric bags.

Burin Kantabutra

Bangkok

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Fiscal authorities are not working as a team

The Thai Stock Exchange's Money Channel (www.moneychannel.co.th) says that the director of the Fiscal Policy Office suggested that the Bank of Thailand should lower the policy interest rate to make it closer to that of the United States Federal Reserve Systems.

I have always been bewildered by the Thai mentality of "working as a team". No wonder the fanciful phrases "Team Thailand", or "Dream Team", as coined, or rather copied, by Thai politicians, never sells!

This is not because the Fiscal Policy Office director from the Thai Ministry of Finance has stepped onto the central bank's monetary turf, but the fact that she also sits on the central bank's monetary policy committee.

It really caught me by surprise that she broke the news about the policy interest rate, which was also carried by foreign financial wire services.

A friend at the WBRC (the World Bank) told me that it is "customary" for Thais not to offer opinions in the meetings, but they are more than willing to speak out outside the meetings about what comes to them as hindsight.

If the director does not leak anything outside the monetary policy committee, soon enough "an informed source at the Ministry of Finance" will be quoted by the local media the next day.

Team Thailand, indeed!

Sornnagi Kumar

New York

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The dollar is in danger of losing its reserve status

Re: "US Fed move could save the world's economy", Letters, March 20.

Ronald Reagan's under-secretary of the Treasury, Paul Roberts, on the coming US bankruptcy (at www.counterpunch.org/ "The Collapse of American Power"):

"The US will never repay the loans. The American economy has been devastated by off-shoring, by foreign competition, and by the importation of foreigners on work visas, while it holds to a free-trade ideology that benefits corporate fat cats and shareholders at the expense of labour. The dollar is failing in its role as reserve currency and will soon be abandoned. When it ceases to be the reserve currency, the US will no longer be able to pay its bills by borrowing more from foreigners. I sometimes wonder if the bankrupt 'superpower will be able to scrape together the resources to bring home troops stationed in its hundreds of bases overseas, or whether they will just be abandoned."

John Francis Lee

Chiang Rai

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