The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Talk is rife about a forthcoming image engineering for Philippine Airlines that includes a new logo, as the nation’s flag carrier, which has run into air turbulence that meant losing almost P13 billion in 2013, comes soaring high with modest profits. Credit for the turn-around was due to the big drop in oil prices, which constitute about 40 percent of …
Points of View & Perspectives
September, 2015
August, 2015
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30 August
The dirty tricks department
The mudslinging that accompanies politics and trails behind politicians like stringy doggy poo started early for the 2016 presidential derby. The official campaign period is months away, but in a country inundated by pungent political partisanships, anytime is a good time for venomous divisiveness. Especially under a presidency characterized by petty vindictiveness, tracking dirt makes sense.
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30 August
See you in September
Anyone who knows this song tells his/her age, hands down. Not among millennials, definitely, unless a hip grandparent belted it out for show during a family reunion.
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30 August
Continuity theme bad for Mar?
It looks like the camp of Interior Secretary Mar Roxas has unloaded a good portion of its kitty on radio and television advertising. Primetime public-affairs programs, particularly on a major media network, is benefitting from the camp’s advertising binge apparently timed for the next round of surveys on presidential aspirants.
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30 August
At last, a housing research data center
With a housing backlog of 3 million, which is going up by at least 6 percent a year, the housing industry, specifically the companies that provide affordable housing, does not have at its fingertips the data needed to allow both the private sector and the government the tools to decipher what is happening and what are needed to make things happen.
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23 August
The BBL’s sinister semantics
With a virtual gun pointed at our collective heads, its hammer pulled back, cocked, chambers loaded with deadly ordnance and a terrorist’s crooked finger itching to squeeze inside the trigger housing, such threat to accompany the double-bladed and crooked scimitar already positioned across the soft flesh of our throats, these are effectively the conditions under which we are compelled to …
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23 August
Mr. Postman was at your door
Rarely so these days, if ever, isn’t it? Like most figures in what seemed a forever-landscape less than 50 years ago, Mr. Postman—Mang Mianong in my Ilocos childhood, who linked us with Papa working away in Manila—has been fast withdrawing into mere memory.
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23 August
Let electricity spot market work
A new Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) chairman was named recently. His appointment to the post was met with mixed reactions.
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23 August
Philippines to open base near disputed sea, even without US
By Jim Gomez / The Associated Press Subic, Zambales— The Philippines will go ahead with a plan to open military camps at Subic Bay facing the disputed South China Sea (West Philippine Sea) even if a proposed American military presence doesn’t happen, Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said.
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16 August
Hairdressers over heroes
The Aquino administration’s blitzkrieg counterattack against the Vice President’s True State of the Nation Address (Tsona) centered on several aspects that ranged from the Vice President’s recognition of the heroic deaths of the 44 Special Action Force personnel (SAF 44) from the President’s twice-bungled Mamasapano massacre to accusations that issues tackled were old media headlines and, eventually, to criticism of …