While the Philippine peso is falling like a stack of cards (similar to the ones used in PAGCOR casinos), the PSE Composite Index (Phisix) has amazingly—perhaps to show its resiliency—held its ground and even rebounded on days when the currency was free-falling.
This only demonstrated that moneymen, who were almost exclusively playing the peso-dollar game when stock prices were in the doldrums, were again beginning to show interest in speculating in the stock market.
Market makers and foreign investors—prime movers of the PSE—who had long been gone even before the series of parodies that happened in Manila’s top corridors of power unraveled in 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 are currently at 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 had the index indeed bottomed out?
Or were these 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 than 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 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.