Quora Answer: What Happens When the Beneficiaries Predecease the Policy Owner of the Insurance Policy?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “My older sister had my mother and me as beneficiaries of her life insurance.  My mother died several years ago.  I am now the only beneficiary left.  How would it be determined who the beneficiary would be then, if I died before her?”

Should you pass away, and there is no other nominated beneficiary for the policy, the monies will become part of the estate, to be distributed according to the will, or intestate laws, depending.  This is rather straightforward in that sense.  It is always prudent to relook the nomination of policies every few years.  It is part of estate planning, and the entire process should be reviewed every five years or so, and even annually, if you are in the last stages of your life.

Quora Answer: What Happened with Malaysia’s Sovereign Wealth Funds?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What happened to Malaysia’s sovereign wealth funds?”

Corruption first.  Mismanagement second.  A recovery since, though one still dwarfed by global peers.  Malaysia runs two entities that people conflate constantly.  1Malaysia Development Bhd., 1MDB, was a state investment fund founded in 2009 by then Prime Minister Dato’ Sri Mohammed Najib Tun Abdul Razak.  Khazanah Nasional Bhd. is Malaysia’s actual sovereign wealth fund, founded on 3^rd September 1993, a separate entity with a separate mandate.  1MDB is the reason “Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund” became global shorthand for kleptocracy.  Khazanah inherited that reputational damage anyway, and had its own crisis to answer for besides.  Understanding what happened requires separating the two, then tracing how each one collapsed and recovered on its own terms.

How 1MDB Worked

Malaysian businessman Low Taek Jho, known as Jho Low, was not a banker.  Educated at Harrow and Wharton, he founded his own investment firm, Jynwel Capital, after graduating in 2005, and built his early standing by connecting Najib Razak to Gulf sovereign funds such as Mubadala.  That access, not a banking career, is what put him at the centre of 1MDB.  He operated as a fixer and architect rather than a financier deploying his own capital, orchestrating the offshore structures, and directing where the money went, while Goldman Sachs supplied the institutional cover his operation lacked.

Goldman raised US$6.5 billion for 1MDB through three bond offerings between 2012 and 2013, earning close to US$600 million in fees, twenty times the standard rate for underwriting of that size.  Ng Chong Hwa, known professionally as Roger Ng, Goldman’s former head of investment banking for Malaysia, and Timothy Leissner, the bank’s former Southeast Asia Chairman, both took part in the scheme.  Leissner later testified that he personally transferred US$35 million in kickbacks to Ng, and both men faced criminal prosecution.  US and Malaysian authorities determined that US$4.5 billion was diverted from 1MDB into offshore shell companies.  Low spent it on a US$250 million yacht, luxury real estate in New York, Beverly Hills, and London, paintings by Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, and financing for the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street.

Goldman ultimately paid close to US$6 billion in combined settlements with Malaysian and US authorities, one of the largest penalties in Wall Street history.  Najib Razak was convicted and imprisoned.  Low remains a fugitive, believed to be in China, a claim Beijing denies.  Low himself has disputed being the sole mastermind, telling The Straits Times in 2020 that he is “an easy target for all of those above given the fact that I am not a politician,” a claim that carries some weight given Najib’s own conviction, even if it also reads as self-serving deflection from a man still avoiding trial.

Khazanah’s Separate Collapse

Khazanah Nasional posted a pre-tax loss of RM6.27 billion in 2018, against a pre-tax profit of RM2.89 billion the year before.  Net worth adjusted fell 21.6 per cent to RM91 billion, from RM116 billion at the end of 2017.  Realisable asset value fell to RM136 billion from RM157 billion over the same period.  Even in the year Khazanah claimed a profit, its adjusted asset value had already fallen by more than a fifth.  Despite this, the fund still declared a RM1.5 billion dividend for 2018, a decision that called its management's credibility into serious question.  This was not 1MDB-style theft.  It was years of weak investment discipline and governance drift, arriving at the same moment Malaysia’s global reputation was already in ruins from a scandal Khazanah had no direct hand in.

Khazanah’s assets sat at just over US$20 billion during this period.  Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s sovereign fund, held an estimated US$250 billion at the same time, more than ten times the size, from a smaller country with fewer natural resources and a smaller domestic market.  A resource-rich nation running a fund one-tenth the size of its neighbour’s was not a funding problem.  It was the compounded cost of weak governance layered on top of a national scandal.

The Recovery, and What It Rests On

Khazanah has turned itself around since, under Managing Director Dato’ Amirul Feisal Wan Zahir.  Net asset value grew from RM85 billion in 2023 to RM103.6 billion in 2024, a 22 per cent increase, reaching total assets of RM176.2 billion by 2025, with net income of RM7.14 billion.  The fund’s one-year rolling return hit 24.6 per cent in 2024, its best on record, up from 5.7 per cent the year before.  Moody’s and S&P Global Ratings assigned Khazanah its inaugural investment-grade credit rating, A3 and A- respectively, citing a sound track record of investment and funding discipline.

The recovery is not confined to the balance sheet.  Khazanah holds controlling or major stakes in Telekom Malaysia, Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia Airports, Malaysia Airlines, and UEM Group, the backbone of the country’s telecommunications, power, aviation, and infrastructure sectors, and continues actively managing them rather than treating them as passive holdings.  It has positioned Malaysia as a leader in Islamic finance, issuing the world’s first exchangeable swukuk.  It launched Jelawang Capital in October 2024 as a national fund-of-funds to grow Malaysia’s venture capital ecosystem, and has allocated RM1 billion toward mid-tier companies in semiconductors and advanced manufacturing, alongside RM1.5 billion for energy transition projects including large-scale solar.  This is diversification, still early relative to Singapore’s own investment in the same sectors through Temasek Holdings and EDBI, but progress against a fund that was, a decade ago, defending a dividend it could not justify.

None of this recovery closes the gap against the rest of the world’s sovereign capital.  Global sovereign wealth fund assets crossed US$15 trillion for the first time in December 2025.  Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global leads that table at US$1.6 to US$2.2 trillion, holding stakes in over 7,200 companies worldwide.  China runs two funds in the top five, CIC at US$1.24 trillion and SAFE Investment Company at US$1.08 trillion.  Abu Dhabi’s ADIA sits close to US$1 trillion, Saudi Arabia’s PIF near US$925 to US$930 billion, and Kuwait’s KIA between US$846 billion and US$1 trillion.  Singapore’s GIC manages somewhere between US$769 billion and US$936 billion, and Temasek Holdings trails at US$288 billion.

Khazanah's total assets, converted from its 2025 figure, sit at US$38 billion, well outside the top thirty funds tracked globally, closer in scale to Turkey’s TVF or Kazakhstan’s Samruk Kazyna than to any of the trillion-dollar funds above it.  A country with Malaysia’s oil, palm oil, and manufacturing base sitting this far down the global table is the price for a decade of failure.

Corruption at the scale 1MDB reached does not merely cost the money that was stolen.  It costs a country its standing for years afterwards, regardless of what its actual sovereign wealth fund does to rebuild in the meantime.  To be fair, Khazanah’s post-2019 leadership has done real work: an investment-grade rating, record returns, genuine diversification, and continued stewardship of the national assets it was built to manage.  What it has not done, and cannot do quickly, is close a scale gap against Norway, the Gulf funds, China, and Singapore that took a decade of scandal and drift to open.  Malaysia had the resources to have built one of the largest sovereign funds in the world.  What it built instead was a cautionary tale, and a slow, genuine climb back out of it.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Quora Answer: What Does Terence Kenneth John Nunis Think of Imran Kassim?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What does Terence Kenneth John Nunis think of Imran Kassim, having potentially worked with him before?”

I was business development manager at Novo Logistics Pte. Ltd. for almost a year.  Imran Kassim was the sole director, and had recently inherited control of the business.  I spent a great deal of time with him in that period, as was the requirements of my job.

He had extremist tendencies that warranted a closer look at his correspondence and finances.  Shortly after I officially left the company, he was put under formal investigation.  He tried to sneak into Syria via Turkey twice, contacted and attempted to join ISIS, before he was finally detained under the Internal Security Act for attempting specific acts.

In January 2020, Imran Kassim became the first person to be convicted under the Terrorism (Suppression of Financing) Act, for transferring funds to a known designated terrorist.  He admitted all charges.  He was sentenced to 33 months.  Upon release, he will continue to be detained under the Internal Security Act.  I predict he will be a very old man by the time he is released, since he has a strong propensity to reoffend, and is beyond rehabilitation.

You are free to speculate on my opinion of him.

Quora Answer: What is Preventing the US from Blockading China Since Its Military is Unchallenged?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Given the United States military still has unchallenged dominance in the world’s oceans and skies, what is preventing the US from simply imposing a blockade on China, and destroying its resource-hungry, export-reliant manufacturing economy?”

There are a lot of assumptions borne out of consuming the American jingoistic wine.  The United States has the most powerful military.  It has the most powerful air force and navy.  That is undisputed.  That is not the same as “unchallenged”.  If the Americans had an unchallenged military dominance, they would have no need for these multilateral international frameworks and treaties.

Firstly, as large, and as powerful as the US military is, it still has its limitations, much of it logistical.  The US has a large sovereign territory to defend.  In addition to that, there are its commitments to allies, overseas bases in foreign territories, and the maintenance of a reserve.

Secondly, have you considered how large China is?  China borders 14 different nations, and the vast majority of them would not appreciate American troops within their borders to enforce some ridiculous blockade.  These nations include Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, and India – all nuclear-armed.  Even if we were to consider the coast, the sheer logistics of maintaining a blockade would be horrendously expensive, and require the bulk of US naval and aerial forces.  Who is going to defend the other territorial commitments of the US?

Finally, China is not some third-rate military.  This is not some poor Central American or Middle Eastern failed state.  China is a near peer adversary, with the ability to deny tactical control of the theatre in their near abroad.  The threat of Chinese missiles in a hostile scenario means American carrier groups must stay about 300 nautical miles from the coast, well beyond the effective operational range of the carrier-based aircraft.  Otherwise, they are in danger of losing an entire carrier group.  This means a blockade is tactically impossible. 

From a strategic perspective, the US may try to impose sanctions, and an international blockade, but it will not be effective.  China is the largest economy in the world be GDP, and PPP - the US is the largest by GDP per capita.  It is a giant in the world economy.  American allies are not going to allow stupid Americans leeway to destroy their own economies, and world trade.

Quora Answer: What Do You Think of China’s Economic Prospects?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What do you think of China’s economic prospects?”

When we consider China’s economic prospects, there are several things to consider.  Firstly, the size of the population.  China’s population is almost 1.4 billion.  The population growth is about 0.6%.  China’s middle class is about 500 million and, in 2012, spent 7% of the world’s private consumption.  That number is projected to increase substantially.

Secondly, the size of their manufacturing base.  China exports over US$2.3 trillion worth of goods.  Consider, for example, that China makes 90% of all computers, 80% of all air conditioning equipment, and 70% of all mobile phones.  And now consider textiles, steel production, fashion, furniture, heavy equipment and so forth.

Eventually, going into the next century, growth will slow for varied reasons.  But China will still be making a lot of things and the Chinese population will still be buying a lot of things.  China is where Japan was in the 1950s, recovering from war, and making cheap and disposable products before moving on into high end, quality equipment.  China will eventually be where Japan is, with more than 10 times the population, and many times the manufacturing base.

By 2020, more than 50% of the population will be urban.  There will likely be some social upheaval due to the struggle to keep them all employed.  But industry and economic policy will adjust.  In summary, the economic prospects look quite good well into the next decade.

Quora Answer: What Does Huawei's US Ban Mean for the Rollout of 5G Globally?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What does Huawei’s US ban mean for the rollout of 5G globally?”

Huawei is one of the leading suppliers of 5G technology.  More importantly, they are a lot cheaper than their rivals.  It is not going to affect developed countries globally.  Nations in the far East, such as Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and even China, have rolled out, or are rolling it out now.  Much of Western Europe are already setting it up.  The only country that is behind the curve is the US.  Not only is theirs slower, but also more expensive.

On one hand, this is due to the complicated nature of overlapping government authorities, from state to municipal.  It is not centralised.  On the other hand, the US does not actually invest in infrastructure.  Telecommunications providers only focus on dense urban areas, with less emphasis on overall coverage.  Making it more expensive is not going to help that.

Quora Answer: What if North Korea & China were to Attack Japan?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What if North Korea and China were to attack Japan?”

This is not going to happen.  Assuming Japan’s allies, South Korea and the US do not get involved, which is very unlikely, the Self-Defence Force is no pushover.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Wars are exercises in logistics.  Campaigns are conducted based on this.  North Korea is a non-actor.  They have no means to project their military beyond their borders.  They have no functioning air force or navy.  China does not have the air force or the navy to secure the corridor to launch an invasion.  They do not have the sealift to send troops to Taiwan, 200 km away; they have no means to send a meaningful invasion force 3,000 km away.

The PLA is not structured as an offence force.  China’s military invests in area denial, which is meant to deter the USN’s carrier fleets, for example.  It is not meant for offence action over an extended theatre.  As such, they have limited air-to-air refuelling for an air force of that size, and not enough surface vessels.