While the Philippine peso is falling down like a stack of cards (similar to the ones used in PAGCOR casinos), the PSE Composite Index (Phisix), amazingly – perhaps to show its resiliency – had held its ground and even rebounded on days when the currency was free-falling.
This only demonstrated the fact that money men who were almost exclusively playing the peso-dollar game when stock prices were in the doldrums, were beginning to show their interest to speculate in the stock market once again.
Market makers and foreign investors – prime movers of the PSE – that had long been gone even before the series of parodies that happened in Manila’s top corridors of power unraveled in the 2002, seem to be stepping in once more in the Philippine stock market, after the Gloria administration showed its desire to clean up its act.
Recently, blue chips – which currently are at their dirt-cheap levels almost similar to the turbulent days (post-coup) of the Cory Aquino era – were seen being plucked up by enthusiastic foreign fund managers who are betting that the Philippine economy will fare much better under Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s new mandate.
Had the early departure of foreign money (players and investors alike) during the fading months of Erap’s ill-fated administration been a boon and the index had indeed bottomed-out?
Or, these were just the omen of even dire things to come? While the Thailand baht – the currency that triggered the economic crash in Southeast Asia in 1997 – had considerably recovered much of its value, the Philippine peso, on the contrary, is now at levels even much lower when the financial crisis started. Can we learn our lesson from the Thais? Or, is our sociocultural heritage and brand of politics such a volatile mixture that only a cultural revolution can, perhaps, cure? Can the Phisix -like the bamboo – continue to show its resiliency?
Too bad. For a country that contends its population to be the most educated in Asia, how can these things happen quickly and oh, so frequently? Do we love chaos and confusion that much that these are all by
sociopolitical design? Are we emulating the carnival in Rio — but with Manila’s nauseating political overtones?
Questions and still more questions will continue to be poised upon the minds of forward-looking Filipinos who still dream of the good life in their homeland and…not just to be relegated as yet another 7,000 plus island backwater in this part of the globe.