PH: better economic manager than Greece
loans" of EU keeping their banks from collapsing but at one point limiting daily withdrawals of ATMs to only US$60 (about P2,700) and closed for three weeks until recently. Unemployment rate is at a high 26%.
The Greek Crisis started in 2008 with the implosion of Wall Street due to the real estate -based over financing. By 2009, Greece admitted it had fudged its macro-economic figures by understating its deficit. This destroyed the trust and confidence of the international community. That was political suicide.
The PH Central Bank was caught doing that same atrocity in the last dying years of the Marcos dictatorship that morphed the nation into an international pariah and hastened the downfall of the dictator in 1986. The then newlyminted President Cory Aquino, the darling of the Free World, refused to ask for debt condonation - and with honor, and even for honor alone , paid every cent of our debt according to schedule.
PH was back into international respectability - and in Pnoy's time was rewarded with the so-called "Investment Grade," the highest credit rating in our entire history.
The laundry list of possible demands of the troika on Greece to get the third bailout funds- PH had already done through the past many years of the post-Marcos era.
Greece's shipping companies were to be slapped with higher taxes and the 30% tax shelter of the rich tourist oriented islands had to be removed to shore up government finances. PH had long destroyed monopolies and erased unjust tax structures for "protected industries" and economic zones in the past.
Greece is tasked to take up 23% VAT by force but PH had voluntarily raised our VAT to 12% during GMA'S time and thus strengthened our fiscal footings. Greece was also mandated to privatize its many international ports and sell its ownership in the giant telco called OTE. If Greek government were to sell its entire holdings in the shipping industrythis would yield about E50 billion.
PH, on the other hand, had already done large scale privatization long ago since the time of FVR and our policy (since then) has been "less government in business is always better." There are only a few big-ticket items like military camps, real estate assets and some media facilities that can still be privatized here.
Greece is not at war,so the troika is looking at Greece reducing its military spending by E300 million. PH has been modest, too modest in fact , with our defense expenditure so that our military capability today is a joke. But we surmise that such was a government policy choice between providing basic social services for the poor rather than buy guns and jet planes.
But our fiscal house is definitely in good order. Rome can keep the glory that it was but we can take the grandeur that was (once) Greece's. That grandeur that was Greece , definitely, was of another day, with apologies to Frank Sinatra.
The big lesson in the Greece Crisis facing us today is in the face of the burgeoning ASEAN integration (akin to the EU) - is that PH should go slow in any discussion seeking our participating in having one ASEAN currency . We should try to be as smart as Britain in that respect. Our good economic housekeeping must not be tattered by the sloppy management of the economies of some of our neighbors .
Let's lived up to our economic management billing- we are no Greeks, in this respect.
*** (Bingo Dejaresco, a former banker, is a financial consultant, media practitioner and political strategist. His views are his personally and do not necessarily reflect those of FINEX. His email address is dejarescobingo@yahoo.com.)