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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 19 2018, @01:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the pillage-and-burn dept.

How a country suddenly went 'crazy rich'

Indonesia, the nation with the world's largest Muslim population, is home to a rapidly growing middle class. As Rebecca Henschke reports from Jakarta, this has given rise to a striking phenomenon - the so-called "Crazy Rich" Indonesians.

[...] The hashtag #crazyrichsurabayans started trending on social media after a local teacher at an elite school shared anecdotes about the family of one of her students - tales of them travelling to get their vaccinations done in Japan and of holidays in Europe. She is now writing a book about it and there is talk of a movie.

Recently, the luxurious lavish wedding of a couple from Surabaya was dubbed the ultimate Crazy Rich Surabayans event by local media. Hundreds of guests from Indonesia and abroad attended, it was reported, and all were said to have been entered into a prize draw for a Jaguar sports car. The groom, it's understood, had proposed with the assistance of a flash mob in front of hundreds of total strangers at the Venetian Macao resort. Many members of Indonesia's growing upper-middle class, concentrated solely in the west of the country, have money their parents would never have dreamed of - and most think it's normal, and perhaps even essential, to show it off.

Following a massive reduction in the country's poverty rate in the last two decades, one in every five Indonesians now belongs to the middle class. They're riding a commodities boom - the burning and churning-up of this vast archipelago's rich natural resources, including logging, palm oil, coal, gold and copper. This, combined with aggressive domestic spending, low taxes and little enforcement of labour laws, means that those who know how to play the system are raking it in.

"Surabaya is the capital of East Java province in Indonesia. Surabaya is the second-largest city in Indonesia with a population of over 3 million within the city proper and over 10 million in the Greater Surabaya metropolitan area, known as Gerbangkertosusila."

Indonesia is the world's 4th most populous country with over 261 million people as of 2016.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @02:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @02:46AM (#776153)

    Money will flow from backward countries to those who encourage its use:
    https://cointelegraph.com/news/reports-crypto-now-considered-a-commodity-on-indonesia-s-stock-exchange [cointelegraph.com]

    I said this last year when the "big china ban" happened, they are only screwing over their country. Here was the post:

    Yes, this may lead to a bubble like never seen as chinese investors/traders try to get the last easily available btc over there until this is sorted out. Can all of china wait until the end of the year? BTC might be double or triple the price by then... Of course it could go the other way too but generally there is infinite yuan/dollars/fiat and limited btc so people prefer to grab it while they can.

    https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=21606&page=1&cid=569469#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]