COMMENT | Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim let loose last week – if that’s the word – when he, inter alia, asked the government to “call bank owners and say you (the banks) need to reduce profits, reduce it but not wipe it out. What is reducing RM8 billion to RM6 billion.”

To banks, and likeminded financial institutions, domestic or foreign: a heck of a lot. Anwar, yet again, is being naïve, desperate, and populist.

Banks’ responses will be for Anwar to take a hike. Certainly not, they’ll say, in Malaysia’s current business environment, and not at this juncture of the economic cycle (of a worsening recession). Without overstating it, the cycle could become longer.

For context, the present movement control order (MCO) has already been extended once. Associated with it is Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s wish for an “emergency”. Underlying both is the raw fact that the Covid pandemic in Malaysia is worsening.

And if the United Kingdom, Brazilian or South African variants of Covid - mutating faster and a worse killer than the Chinese Wuhan version - were to find its way into Malaysia, a far harder and longer MCO crackdown and emergency will become mere truism...