Will the embattled Philippine Stock Exchange ever bounce back from the most devastating crisis in its history? How much longer will it take to save the sinking ship or, at the very least, pluck out the few hardy survivors from those leaky lifeboats awash in the raging sea of financial disaster?
The immediate prospects of recovery, we are told, are bleaker than bleak. We are talking here of basic survival or just managing to stay afloat day by day, even hour by hour.
Just a few minutes into the daily ABS-CBN Stock Market Report makes your heart go out to the very competent talking heads like Koko Alcuaz, Timi Nubla, Kim Bernardo and Evette Novenario. You immediately sense that they find absolutely no more joy covering a shipwreck day after demoralizing day. There's only so much bad news they can deliver and so much happy talk they can conjure out of thin air.
What can't be missed is that the Best World fiasco has effectively dragged the PSE, which was hardly in good health in the first place, to the very brink of oblivion. For the past weeks, it has been hovering way below the 2,000 cellar level (1,720 to be exact) that it occupied during the height of the Asian financial meltdown in late 1998.
Instead of going down to the bottom of things, doing what must be done and letting the pieces fall where they may, the PSE has succumbed to all-out fraticide. With warring brokers telling what's presumably the raw truth about each other's insider-trading and other manipulations, the PSE has attained world-class status as the stock market only the financially masochistic or suicidal would bother about.
The stink, as we all know, extends much farther than the twin bourses at Ortigas and Ayala. Not only billions of pesos have been won or lost. Some of the biggest names in the country, including that of President Estrada, have been drawn, fairly or unfairly, into the raging flames of controversy.
With the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission calling Estrada to task for "meddling" in behalf of his close friend Dante Tan, the failed genius of BW Resources, the scandal factor has risen sky high. This has been aggravated by Perfecto Yasay's very glib flip-flopping about the exact nature and extent of Estrada's involvement. We may never know.
The understatement of the season is that PSE's in-house investigation has done little to sort out the confusion.
Now we have the spectacle of the investigators being brusquely investigated by the Senate, some obliging judge jumping into the fray with the usual Temporary Restraining Order and certain professional mudslingers tarring the anti-Tan faction with the darkest colors imaginable.
This is in sharp contrast to what happens, for instance, in the New York Stock Exchange where traders who run afoul of the rules are promptly handcuffed and dumped into jail. Compared to the chastening experiences of such disgraced Wall Street high-flyers like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, their Filipino counterparts are having the time of their lives turning the tables on their accusers.
It should come as a surprise if that poor guy in charge of the PSE compliance unit ends up in jail instead of the crooks he's supposed to unmask. Such are the hazards of not playing deaf and dumb when dealing with people who are deemed untouchable.
So where does this whole shebang put the PSE?
Into the very depths of investor hell, nobody knows for how long.
The one important factor the BW handlers have willfully ignored is that something called "crisis PR" is better used in Philippine political wars than in financial conflicts that involve foreign parties.
In other words, it's irrelevant what the people out in the streets and the coffeeshops have to say. If we're talking investments of the foreign variety, we're talking of fund managers who always look beyond the local media for information and guidance.
Whether foreigner or Filipino, fund managers tend to be hard-boiled types who spare no feelings and ask the toughest questions. They're forever on the look-out for snow jobs and other games of obfuscation and deceit.
There are fund managers and fund managers, some more reputable than others. One thing that's obvious is that the guys who play for the long-term have either left for the time being or they're sitting on their hands, waiting for as long as it takes for the mess to sort itself out. In the meantime, there are other hotter stock markets in the neighborhood. Take, for instance, Hong Kong and Bombay with the recent excitement about Internet and information technology stocks.
So damaging has been the PSE's unhealthy fixation on gaming and real estate stocks that bad luck has been strangulating even the so-called blue-chips. Look at the unfairness of it all that has hit Ayala Land and PLDT, among other endangered species, and weep bitter tears for this country.