Good News and Bad News for the Philippines This Week

Highlights of the Week: News, events and updates that are likely to affect your investments and trades in the Philippines stock market.

Good News and Bad News for the Philippines This Week

There had been a mix of good news and bad news for the Philippine economy and politics this week. For the good news, the UK government assures Philippines of more investments. British Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday assured Philippine President Benigno Aquino of his government's continued support for the Philippines' public-private partnership program (PPP) and said he looked forward to more British companies investing in the country.

Another good news is that Moody's unit raises Philippines growth forecast. The research arm of Moody's Investors Services has raised its economic growth forecast for the Philippines this year to 4.7 per cent from 4 per cent, citing the government's ant-corruption drive and big push for infrastructure development that will aid efforts to attract investors.

However, the bad news is that the Philippines risks joining money-laundering blacklist. The Philippines faces the risk of joining a global money-laundering blacklist after it failed to approve all required amendments to legislation on illegal movement of money, threatening its ability to attract foreign investment.

Ending up on the Financial Action Task Force blacklist would also make it difficult for Filipinos abroad to send money home and for local banks to transact business overseas.

Thoughts About the News

It's a good thing that our government and our country in general is getting more investments, better forecasts and good ratings. It means more investors would be encouraged to invest in our country. However, it bothers me that our current administration has focused too much on putting its now former Chief Justice Renato Corona on an exhausting and somewhat politically vindictive trial.

Our policy makers could have spent more time, effort and our nation's resources on much more pressing and rather important issues such as trying as much as we can not to be at risk of joining the money-laundering blacklist.

Or maybe passing necessary bills to improve our educational system or maybe focus on making it easier for local entrepreneurs to setup businesses which could eventually help in pumping more investments on our local market thus would result into creating more jobs. It's not that I feel the issue about Corona shouldn't have been resolved or be avoided, I just felt that there are many other pressing issues that could have been given more focus and attention to.