Financial crisis creates opportunities for RP

No doubt that the breakthrough in the $700-billion bailout plan that the US Congress has virtually approved would certainly result in the stability of the world’s financial markets. But it doesn’t mean to say that this problem ends with this bailout plan. We can still expect some glitches along the way. I’m sure that those Harvard or Wharton graduates in Economics are still scratching their heads as to how they could have averted this financial debacle. Yes, it is a debacle in the sense that many big American investors have virtually lost millions, if not billions of dollars in their lifetime savings.

We should be thankful that the Philippines is just too poor a country that we are not really affected by this financial disaster. But months back, certain financial analysts were already starting to sound the alarm bells, but they went largely unheeded. Hence, Americans are learning to curtail their “greed,” whereas in this country… the message to the rich and powerful was to “moderate” their greed. That’s what usually happens when people cling to material things that only big money can buy.

But while only the very rich Filipinos (chances are, a big number of them live in Forbes Park) were hit by the US financial crisis, it must be said that there is another side to this crisis and it is called opportunity. Right now, the rich Asian nations are no longer looking at Wall Street in order to invest their extra cash. So where do they put in their money? Well, a developing Third World country could be a juicy option. Hey, that means the Philippines could be a potential area where to plunk in these investments. But where?

As we’ve said, Cebu’s South Reclamation Properties (SRP) where Filinvest Land Inc. (FLI) just signed a deal with the City of Cebu for a P80-billion land development could attract these foreign investors. But the question is, are we ready to entertain such foreign investors? Let me point out that FLI only bagged 50 hectares of the 300-hectare SRP, so there’s still a lot of land waiting to be developed. But I must tell you that the City of Cebu is already in the middle of closing a deal with two other interested investors. Mind you, these are still the local Filipino business groups, which are the first to see the potential of Cebu’s growth and development.

When the rich investors from Singapore, Japan, Korea and yes, including the Middle East, find their way to this region, I’m sure that it would certainly make the end of the year 2008 very interesting. Let’s just hope that Filipinos are ready to embrace these foreign investors, rather than scare them with added bureaucracy or worse… corruption!

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for this country is that Cory created the 1987 Constitution where we put limits to foreign investments to only 49 percent when it comes to mining exploration. Yet, the Arroyo administration has trumpeted the idea that our shortcut out of our poverty is when we get investors to exploit our mineral resources to the fullest. This is why we’ve been advocating for Charter changes a long time ago… for a paradigm shift to a federal system so that each state can develop its own natural resources with foreign partners. But our politicians refuse to allow the election of delegates to a constitutional convention (con-con) together with the 2010 presidential elections. I don’t know why they are against this when it means that any work the con-con does will be after 2010 anyway.

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That the world is in turmoil in 2008 was totally unexpected, especially when many of us thought that the year is a good year for the Chinese. But with all the troubles we have had, from the man-made political troubles we had with the failed ZTE-NBN deal to the earthquake that struck the Sichuan province in China and that devastating cyclone “Nargis” that obliterated most of Burma or Myanmar and Hurricane “Ike” that wreaked havoc in Texas, then that food price scare, plus the record-breaking prices of crude oil and now the financial debacle that struck Wall Street so hard, we really don’t know what next would happen in the last three months of 2008.

Last weekend, we learned that our famous matinee idol, Paul Newman, whom we always called “Cool Hand Luke” from his 1967 movie of the same title and later in that hit 1973 movie “The Sting” had died at the age of 83. To my generation, Paul Newman represented sanity in Hollywood, having been married only to one woman, Joanne Woodward, and worked to help the poor and downtrodden people. Also last April, another movie icon, Charlton Heston, died; he was Moses and Ben-Hur to our generation. With these two movie icons gone, we see no one from Hollywood taking on their footsteps. Indeed, the year 2008 will be unforgettable to many of us.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.philstar.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, “Straight from the Sky,” shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.