THE $1-BILLION LOAN TO IMF

There is certainly nothing wrong with the country's plan to lend $1 Billion to the IMF, if indeed we can afford it.  So doing, the Philippines will be supporting the global efforts to stabilize the world economy and help maintain it on a growth path, which in turn will also eventually benefit us and the region to which we belong.

BSP Governor Armando M. Tetangco says that today our economic fundamentals are sound and our banks are able to meet their credit needs.  Well, on the latter, I have a little comment: - haven't we just closed Export Bank?  At any rate, the IMF has been called "lender of last resort" after it helped many countries address their internal financial difficulties in the past, including the Philippines which had wallowed in IMF debts for close to four decades.

PNoy will thus go down in history as the only president who is able to lend at least a billion dollars to the IMF.  The timing of the loan, whether intended or unintended, is truly great.  Come his SONA, he will surely be shouting to the four winds about this magnificent administration of his administration.

I hope he would not boast of it so much as he surely would the billions of dollar commitments and new business assurances he brought along to the Philippines following his recent trip to Europe and the US.  Such business commitments have come and gone every time returns from a foreign trip, yet such promised foreign investments, let's get real, have never truly materialized. Perhaps, it's high time we stop counting the chicks before the eggs are hatched.
 
As things are, whoever among his advisers has thought of the loan to the IMF, just in time for his SONA, must now be earning tremendous pogi points from the President.  But wait a minute!  That is only up until  one realizes that this particular achievement of being able to lend money to the IMF is a bit hollow.  Why?  Because had it not been for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who had succeeded in 2006 -- remember, no other past president of this country has ever done that -- in settling all of our debts to the IMF.   In other words, without such equally unprecedented achievement of GMA, whom PNoy continues to persecute up to now and charge as a good-for-nothng president --  this country would never be able to do that which PNoy will be particularly shouting about in his forthcoming SONA.