Business & Economics Perspective Blogger

Bongbong Marcos' Facebook Page The ASEAN Philippines 2026 was taking place in Cebu City. It's the 48th Asian summit. Last time, I wrote an article in 2023 where I talked about the great ASEAN opportunity . That post was a critique last 2023. I was writing how the Philippines has potential but it's held back by Pinoy Pride Economics . What has Pinoy Pride Economics done anyway? As I read the late Lee Kuan Yew's book From Third World to First , there was a stinging rebuke not just about the Marcoses but also about the sad state of OFWs: Mrs. Aquino's successor, Fidel Ramos, whom she backed, was more practical and established greater stability . In November 1992, I visited him. In a speech at the 18th Philippine Business Conference, I said,  "I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy."  In private, President Ramos said he agreed with me that  a British parliame...

Manila Bulletin Today is Labor Day, and it's a non-working holiday . Since it's May 1, it's easy for me to think of the Kilusang Mayo Uno movement. The same slogan still shows up almost every rally, "Raise the national wage to PHP 1,200.00 per day." It "doesn't help" that I do get the  Tu Quoque argument or "You too!" fallacy. It may look like "I haven't done much" compared to KMU , but I would like to address truths that would never change. It's all about that one fact, " Economics doesn't care about how many times you insult it. It never bends just to silence the insults. " However, it looks like KMU thinks that if they insult economics enough, economics will bend to their whims. However, history has proven them wrong and will still prove them wrong . This time, I'm going to raise an extreme example . KMU is in the situation of, "You may want it when you don't get it. You may no longer want it ...

I was following the Facebook page,  Behind Asia . Right now, I have to get into the argument s . It's not going to be easy to deal with a Facebook page that has at least 217K followers. I'm going to say that my purpose isn't to win the debate, but to spread the facts. I might just be a nobody, but that doesn't mean I should shut up and do nothing. I have my limited freedom of speech, which I can and should use. I'm going to go into Behind Asia's and try to refute some of its ridiculous ideals. I wouldn't take too much time refuting them all, but those I feel like need to be refuted, as soon as possible . Claim: 60-40 isn't an issue, and economic charter change is the "easy solution" This is one of Behind Asia's recent posts . I would like to share the claim before shooting it with common sense. The political elite is pushing aggressively for Economic Charter Change (Cha-Cha). The central argument is that the 1987 Constitution’s restrictive ...

It's a shame, really, that I didn't think about writing this article on OFWs again. I got somewhat fixated on the  gas prices , and my mind was exhausted. I thought about how I even asked, " Will #SahodItaasPresyoIbaba economics even lower down the prices of gasoline? " It's one thing that the Philippines has been overly reliant  on the Middle East for gasoline. What I overlooked was the OFW phenomenon again . It was so easy to hype on the OFW phenomenon, like what happened with the Filipino nurse, Ello Ed Mundsel Bello, way back in 2015. The OFW hype would've compounded the Philippine economy's "reliance model" to a whole new level of bottleneck!  Analyzing the bottleneck of relying on the Middle East It's already a known fact that several OFWs are sent to the Middle East. I even remember running across a presumably retired dancer who would be 64 today, on Facebook. The guy actually bragged about how he was a dancer at the Excelsior Hotel in...

ABS-CBN News I thought about what life was like in the late 1990s. It was a boomer vs. millennial clash . I remember how often I kept complaining about high school during the K+10 era. Even worse, the real problem why I hated school was that school cared more about grades for the sake of grades , instead of teaching students how to get good grades based on learning first. What may have compounded it is that we've had boomer parents who thought that fatigue is a badge of honor .  What I realized is the common problem of toxic positivity . We have the "good vibes only" or "everything will turn out right in the end". Sadly, life doesn't always turn out that way. You can tell a terminally ill cancer patient that, and the cancer patient would die anyway. No amount of toxic positivity ever fixes the problem. This time, I'd like to rant once more about how toxic positivity has been used to defend the outdated 1987 Constitutio of the Philippines.  The classic r...