Most of the mainstream media present to us a narrative that the Maharlika Wealth Fund is a bad idea for several reasons: One, the timing is bad due to the poor economic climate; two, we have a bad reputation for managing funds; three, a source for potential corruption and looting; and fourth, conflict of interest in the authors of the MWF Bill.

To me, the MWF is a game-changer. It may be the biggest legacy of Marcos presidency. I have already discussed some of the issues in the previous article why I am in favor of the creation of the MWF and why the benefits of creating it outweigh the fears, which I consider mostly ostensible.

The MWF Bill is a brilliant idea because it will simply allocate government sources of revenue from the yearly national budget to a Fund that has the flexibility of a sovereign wealth fund. With professional management, it can continue to grow and produce economic benefits now and in future generations.

The national budget is primarily allocated by Congress through the General Appropriations Act. Since the GAA is prepared by politicians with parochial and territorial concerns, you can expect that most of the appropriations will cater to short-term parochial and territorial concerns and not really to long-term intergenerational development. Because of this vicious cycle, our national government has had little contribution to building big-ticket infrastructure projects and left most of these to the private sector.

Note that the capitalization of the MWF will be sourced from government financial institutions which contribute to the yearly national budget. Removing a small portion of budget allocation to the GAA and putting them into a fund, which, instead of being put to waste thru "waiting sheds" and multi-purpose basketball courts, can be invested as equity to big-ticket
infrastructure projects, high-return blue, and green projects, and countryside development, including agriculture.

The MWF is designed to source funds for windfalls and royalties from natural resources, such as extracted minerals from mining, sale of frequencies, grant of rights, etc. I heard Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Secretary Benjamin Diokno, in an interview, asserted that the government, potentially the MWF, should make money out of the telecom bandwidth or frequencies, from the reclamation of properties, and the extraction of oil and gas and minerals, among others, instead of giving them away, through franchises, licenses, etc.