Let Filipinos eat savings
Filipinos don’t need Remolona’s lecture on humility. We need paychecks that survive contact with the grocery, the rent and the tricycle ride.
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Filipinos don’t need Remolona’s lecture on humility. We need paychecks that survive contact with the grocery, the rent and the tricycle ride.
Nothing sharpens the sense of irony quite like watching the best-paid man in the Philippine government lecture the rest of us about the evils of purchasing stuff, especially when the peso is busy hitting new lows against the dollar.
At the Senate recently, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Eli Remolona Jr. was asked, essentially, why the peso had face-planted to a record P62.265 to the dollar.
His answer skipped past exports, productivity and the price of onions and landed on something closer to a character flaw. We, apparently, are “mayabang.” Boastful. A little too pleased with ourselves. We have, in his words, a “consumption culture.”
Coming from a man who out-earns the average Filipino household roughly 149 times over, this was a bit like being told to skip dessert by the guy who ordered the whole tasting menu.
Wow! The nerve of this guy to gaslight Filipinos over the peso’s weakness, though we have to concede that he had superb help from the other Marcos technocrats, if not from Bongbong himself, in what may yet turn out to be a freefall.
To be fair, Remolona isn’t wrong about everything. The Philippines does run current-account deficits. Savings genuinely help finance investment. Exports could use the boost. That much is economics.
Still, consider what Remolona’s harangue conveniently skipped. The Commission on Audit put Remolona’s pay last year at P52.756 million, the highest of any government official in the country, up from the year before.
The average Filipino family, according to the latest national count, earns P353,230 a year. Saving is a much lighter lift when the rent doesn’t swallow the paycheck.
There’s also this: Households are not even the main player in the nation’s savings story. Corporations banked far more of the country’s P8.4 trillion in gross savings last year than families did.
If there’s a savings gap, ordinary Filipinos are the understudies, not the leads. And the spending itself?
Household consumption grew just 2.8 percent in the second quarter, about half the pace of a year earlier. Not exactly a shopping spree. Mostly what people are buying is food, rent, transportation and electricity — the unglamorous business of staying alive, not champagne.
So the real question isn’t why Filipinos won’t stop spending. It’s why so many of us can’t earn enough to do anything but.
Telling a wealthy household to save more is sound advice. Telling a struggling one to save money it doesn’t have is closer to blame-laying, delivered with a nice title and a government car.
A contradiction lurks here, too. Remolona wants Filipinos to save more, presumably while continuing to spend enough to keep the economy running — because consumption, whatever else it is, is also what keeps the lights on in every sari-sari store in the country.
Get everyone to stop buying at once and watch how fast “prudent” turns into “recession.”
None of this is really about vanity. It’s about wages too low, jobs too scarce, investments too shy, exports too uncompetitive and a government more comfortable assigning homework than doing its own.
Filipinos don’t need Remolona’s lecture on humility. We need paychecks that survive contact with the grocery, the rent and the tricycle ride.
That shortfall was never going to be found in the national character. It’s sitting in the economy — which happens to be the one area the governor is paid, quite generously, to help manage.
And on that score, his tirade leaves rather a lot to be desired.
