Bank Negara has come up with some impressive numbers like that our country's growth has surpassed the five percent mark and to dampen inflationary trends, the interest rate was raised to three percent.

Call me a cynic but I am no great believer in statistics because in a multi-racial and multi-religious society like ours, rosy economic figures can be quite misleading. It is perfectly okay if these conventional figures are applied to homogenous countries like Japan and South Korea, Sweden, Denmark or Norway. We all know that sectorally, figures can be quite different.

It also worries me when economists and analysts speak of consumer confidence because this could be highly massaged when spending are done on credit cards. Credit cards are now a growing industry and banks are falling over each other in offering all kinds of goodies to get people to get their plastic.

The peril is already before our eyes. The number of bankrupts is increasing all the time and the government should be concerned about this because bankruptcies will affect productivity, increase crime and cause family break-ups.

But the banks are saying that the bankruptcy rate is still manageable. They would say that, wouldn't they?