The Philippine Stock Exchange is showing bullish signs but I'm just staring at the rise of USD. I'm not optimistic about any changes in the Philippine anytime soon.
There are still people that think the Philippines is an agricultural country but that mentality reveals their age and how time left them behind. We stopped being an agricultural country when we favored importing the basic farm goods like rice and sugar. Producing these commodities within our lands was more costly and having no infrastructure doesn't help. The cost of importing these goods is much cheaper than growing our own.
These international trades are settled in USD. So when the dollar rates become high, the value to import these goods becomes higher. To the average consumer, you end up with more experience rice and other goods on the market if it's imported.
This follow commodities like gas which will motivated the cost of transportation higher.
The Philippines' greatest economic asset are our overseas workers who remit their earnings from USD to peso. This helps cyclically lower the exchange rates but without a strong economic reason for global investors to invest in the country, the rise of USD rates is more like a foregone conclusion.
There's AI threatening the BPO industry and the overseas Filipino workers. A disruption on these industries will lower the income generated by the country. If the government has less income, they tend to find sources of income and the most common way is increasing taxes or borrow more money elsewhere.
This matters to the common folk because I see less people realizing this early or pages that emphasize the changing world to the lay folk. Most of the time, such realizations don't really reach the people that need to hear this because attention is shifted somewhere else.
People that still hold Peso and save alone are going to have a bad time decades from now. And access to the international markets for investing gets barred and kept to a limited few due to how many obstacles one has to go through just to know how to do it.
I'm currently working on increasing my exposure to the international markets. If I do hold Peso, it's more for just having liquidity for emergency funds and daily expenses.
No government is going to save you because these are filled by people in power that have vested interests for personal gain. I'm not saying all of them but these are institutions that have track records I often be wary about.
Thanks for your time.
