Well now Pheu Thai has brought to the table a law that gives a blanket amnesty to law offenders, which includes everyone, yellow shirts, red shirts and good ol’ Mr T.

So what’s happened thus far:

1. The first reading was passed just under 2 months ago but aimed only at the non-leaders of the protests

2. Second reading is ready to go into parliament in early November.

3. In the meantime they are still talking about the charter amendments, the THB 2.2 trn borrowing bill etc etc

Could Pheu Thai make this all pass? Sure absolutely, the control the majority of the seats in parliament so why don’t they? Well there’s a small risk of confrontation with:

1. The democrat party

2. The People’s democratic force to overthrow thaksinism at lumpini park

3. A whole bunch of other ones

Will a confrontation happen on the streets? I highly doubt it, we’ve gone to look @ lumpini park, its a disorganised protest and poses little threat, one can still jog happily through them without issues. Next the democrat party still can’t get their act together regarding a protest and the police have been able to keep any of their attempts at bay. The other protests, all small in scale.

So what do we think?

We think the government has gone and shot themselves in the foot, they’ve been attempted to push through too many bills that are ridiculous in nature and obviously very self serving (hey! why else would they be politicians then?) in nature. Or perhaps is this all just a basic negotiation tactic, drop the amnesty bill in exchange for allowing the transportation bill to go through? Or they could go ahead and dissolve parliament but we think that PT’s support was decreased given their missteps and the drop in soft commodity prices harming the farming community. In the end we don’t see any chance of the amnesty bill going through, some form of the infrastructure/transportation bill going through and a whole of a noise until this all happens. Finally impact on the market…well without the infrastructure bill there isn’t much more positive news/themes that brokers can sell and with the market still trading high @ 15x trailing PE we wouldn’t be surprised to just see things going sideways at best til year end.

As a side note, during a recent discussion with someone whose thoughts I do respect, she’s worried that all of this political mess ( the rice scheme, rubber scheme, amnesty bill, etc etc etc) may result in further and stronger riots in the country. My viewpoint is that we should go back to the medieval ages and stone the corrupt idiots in parliament so at least they realise they are supposed to doing things for the country and not themselves.