As usual aspiring PhD in “economics” JC Punongbayan issues a biased assessment of what is driving a downturn in Philippine stock indices of late. In his recent Rappler piece Why is the PH stock market among world’s worst? (prefixed by the word “analysis” in all caps just to make sure readers recognise it as such),…
The enemy of high prices is surplus supply and weak demand. Consumers have power over the latter. Stop buying useless trinkets and demand drops, inventories soar, and prices collapse. It is therefore easy and painless to bring traders and retailers to their knees and force them to update the outrageous price tags on their goods…
Read More “If Filipinos want to fight inflation, they should BOYCOTT Christmas” »
The reason Filipinos are poor is because they spend an inordinate amount of time and headspace praying rather than focus on the business of making money. An example is the crowds we see today queueing up for the privilege of catching a glimpse of the most recent Catholic hood ornament. One wonders how “hard” Filipinos…
Read More “Filipinos should stop praying and start making money” »
Famous Filipino singer Lea Salonga recently issued a sensible take on the anger Filipinos supposedly feel about high inflation rates being reported nowadays. This opinion was cited in an Inquirer report… “You gotta wonder, we’re angry about this, we have to see if it’s happened in previous administrations before and if we got angry then,…
Many Filipino “thought leaders” continue to carry on about food security, rising prices, the peso exchange rate and bad infrastructure like baying dogs in the middle of a quiet night. What they seem to have lost sight of is the root of ALL Filipino poverty: overpopulation. This little fact about the Philippines is important because…
Read More “Philippine OVERPOPULATION needs to be discussed again” »
Philippine Opposition “thought” leaders, only quick to throw a wet blanket over recent reports of economists forecasting the Philippines’ economy attaining “upper middle income” status by 2022, lament how there will still be “tens of millions of poor Filipinos” nonetheless. Well tough shit, right? It is not surprising that these whiney voices come from the…
Read More “Inequality is par for the course in a free market economy” »
It’s not just about having big farms and lots of farm machinery to implement industrial farming. You need extensive high-grade infrastructure to store, move, and market the presumably large volumes of produce industrial farming produces from the farmgate to the market. For industrial farming to be viable for grains like rice and corn, for example,…
Of course the obvious short-term solution to “solving” the rice crisis today is to import more of this vital and addictive staple. Any idiot can see that to the only stopgap measure to alleviate the “sufferings” of the poor is to put downward pressure on prices by increasing domestic supply through importation. You don’t need…
Read More “Mar Roxas’s opportunistic “recommendations” to solve the rice “crisis” are all so lame” »
The eminent Nick Joaquin observed this about the inefficiency of Filipino labour in his seminal piece A Heritage of Smallness… The Filipino who travels abroad gets to thinking that his is the hardest working country in the world. By six or seven in the morning we are already up on our way to work, shops…
Read More ““Sipag” is for losers. “Talino” is where the MONEY is!” »
From what I gather, seeing the sorts of thinking that pervades the poltical chatter, the poor are too poor to extricate themselves from poverty. And so the poor are destined to be poor forever, it seems. It is easy to arrive at this conclusion in a society that habitually blames government for their poverty. The…