The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
When the government first conceived of a dole system during the Arroyo administration, its objectives and amount, real or underlying, were less than a quarter as ambitious as its resurrection under the current dispensation. Arroyo was a legitimate and an infinitely more skilled economist than those in today’s Executive branch. She understood both the political, as well as the economic …
Points of View & Perspectives
May, 2015
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4 May
Mixed emotions on summer
“Not a season for me, summer in Manila and almost everywhere in the Philippines—with its relentless heat—has turned into a reason to whine instead,” I would say unguarded among friends here in Vancouver. While no one has barked a response yet at my insensitivity, silence would swarm around me like burst balloons. It’s unimaginable, you see, for them, who have …
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4 May
PNR needs better management
In our column last March 30, we wrote that the Philippine National Railways (PNR) appears to be on the road to perdition due to the public railway’s low standards of safety in securing the protection of its passengers. Just last week, this dire warning came to pass. A southbound train derailed from the tracks near the Magallanes Skyway exit and …
April, 2015
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27 April
Hope, despair and Grace Poe
It would have been an ominous anagram had it not been for a missing letter. The letters P, O and E that spell Poe, perhaps the most significant in Grace Poe’s name, have the same as HOPE, save for one that is usually silent, anyway. As anagrams go, it does not require brains to rearrange P, O and E into …
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27 April
A disdain for the sun
Parents often gloss over some children’s preferences or even think it idiosyncratic, especially in my time. Take mine. As a child, I searched for shadows. Like an elf, I ducked under bushes where my playmates would thrust out their faces and breasts to the sun. Under trees at high noon, when the crown of an acacia tree from across our …
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27 April
Fundraising at Customs
In what appears to be a stinging rebuke to daang matuwid, Commissioner John Phillip Sevilla left the Bureau of Customs, decrying political pressure and linking it to sinister efforts to raise campaign funds for next year’s presidential elections.
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20 April
Investing in capital asset valuation
For far too long, more as a function of the latent external global perspective on debt and deleveraging as a result of an inordinately long recovery in the financial markets, key policy rates, those that determine such mundane matters as bank-savings rates, have been sorely dismal.
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20 April
When did you last go to the library?
If asked, I would look up but unseeing the sky as I search within me for an answer. Maybe three weeks ago, I did but to browse for new items at the Gift Shop, use the washroom, check for new titles, and then cross the famed lobby of the Vancouver Central Library downtown to one of the cafes for a …
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20 April
Grace Poe, LP’s best bet in 2016
Barely six months before the filing of Certificates of Candidacy in October this year, Sen. Grace Poe is, without a doubt, the Liberal Party’s best bet in the presidential election of 2016. Senator Poe has seen her numbers jump by 10 percentage points to 31 percent in the latest Social Weather Stations survey. She is now tantalizingly within striking distance …
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11 April
What’s wrong with the truth?
THE NEXT PAGE / Dean dela Paz Recently, the highest official in the land—the person we trusted with the awesome powers of the presidency, the coffers of the national treasury, and the full might of the police and Armed Forces—has had his word tested and retested. So far, the man has failed those tests miserably. His credibility shot full of …