Transcript
A (0:01)
That was a bit shocking. I had no idea there were questions Chris did not know the answer to. And I had no idea he was an elderly octopus. It's my pleasure at the end of this conference to give some thanks and express some hopes. I thank Chris for his remarks and I thank all the sponsors for their support. Really, we've had tremendous support from a range of different hosts and sponsors in Malaysia and around the region. I thank all of you for coming. I thank the speakers, and I thank all of those from the LSE who traveled here. And I want to ask you to join me in thanking some volunteers. Actually, in many ways, the faculty members were volunteers, but they were doing their job. But we've benefited from some tremendous support from. From a number of student assistants, our Malaysian students from the lse, who became a crucial local support team of BRIDGE from London. Come to the front here. Thank you. You hear the applause. The audience members have had a chance to meet one or two of you at a time at different points. We've benefited from your help throughout conference. And that's just a taste, folks, because you're going to benefit for the next 50, 60, 70 years from the contributions of these wonderful students as they become LSE graduates and as they go on to make enormous contributions to Malaysia and to the world. Thank you for making some contributions to the forum. I hope everyone has enjoyed the day. I hope you have not only enjoyed the day, in fact, I hope there were even one or two moments when you felt uncomfortable. After all, you've been challenged. We've discussed a series of major world issues, issues for the region and issues for each of our countries. Discussed international relations, challenges, difficulties of cooperation, potential for conflict, actual conflicts and what to do about them. We discussed urbanization as an issue of extraordinary transformation in our world, connected to inequalities, connected to a variety of risks and vulnerabilities, but we hope also to resilience and better planning. We discussed issues of economic growth, its sources, its potential absence, its acceleration, its byproducts. We discussed finance and questions of financial stability, where the word question gets underlined a lot because unfortunately, the message was, we have not achieved an architecture of financial stability that is effective for the region or the world, despite knowing how much we needed it. So we've been talking about risks, and we've been talking about a shortage of public goods. If you didn't feel challenged, if you didn't feel uncomfortable at one or two moments, then this wouldn't have been an LSE event. But you should also feel privileged to have been a part of this event. And for all of you who are alumni privileged to have been a part of the lse, I think that the intellectual excitement is great, even while it relates to practical challenges. So I would like to close the day stressing what I stressed at the opening. The LSC is enormously proud of its links with Southeast Asia with Malaysia, and we intend to deepen our links with both the region as a whole and Malaysia in particular. We look forward to the new sauce we hawk Southeast Asia center leadership from Danny Kwa, and we look forward to continuing this conversation with, we hope, a continuing mixture of good news as well as challenges to be met in the future. Thank you all for being a part of the LSE Asia Forum 2014 in Kuala Lumpur.