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I remain convinced that America’s immense creative and commercial energy will shine through whatever social order is imposed on it; much the same way as the might of Chinese entrepeneurial and industrial ethic managed to thrive in the repressive communist regime of the mainland as well as in even most the dysfunctional and corrupt...
Recently, a renowned financial expert in the United States, Suze Orman, was in town for a series of talks about personal finance. Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) brought her over as part of their financial wellness advocacy. Naturally, one of the things she focused, and expressed concerns about, is the Filipino attitude towards...
The grand-daddy of our culture-as-root-cause thesis, the late great Teddy Benigno, in his classic 2002 Star article Why investors avoid us: The trust factor highlighted what, at the time, was a very conservative forecast regarding China’s fortunes made in a Nomura Research Institute (NRI) study that foresaw a China that could “burgeon into the...
I am undoubtedly seen as a determined critic of the administration of Philippine President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. But that is only because the man generally personifies much of the underbelly of the Filipino psyche that I’ve made it a personal online career to highlight over the last several years. In short his character...
When was the last time you’ve seen a truly innovative Filipino idea? That elusive water-powered car? Those fluorescent lights and karaoke machines supposedly invented by Filipinos? They certainly are out there – somewhere. But no one can quite ascertain if they are mere urban legend or objective fact. What does prevail, as the symbol...
In my 2006 book Get Real Philippines Book 1, one of the key solutions I cited to the challenge of effecting fundamental change in the path we have (rather consciously) set for ourselves to chronic impoverishment is to re-evaluate the content of our mass media. I highlighted that it is an easy solution, because...
Beyond spending it, Filipinos do not know what else to do with wealth. Equipped with a better understanding of the nature of capital, we now begin to grasp the role played by imagination in the game of wealth management. Most of this book all but demonstrated how little of this imagination Philippine society possesses....
Entire generations have been indoctrinated in the concepts of hooking up to the bigger global market rather than maintaining local self-sufficiency. Even the United States with its decades-long wanton “outsourcing” binge ultimately shot itself in the foot. It created manufacturing powerhouses like China that are now racking up surplus upon surplus while globo-”sourcer”, the...
Wealth, in primitive times would have been attributed to simple things like a reduced chance of being eaten by a predator, an improved ability to survive a fight with another tribesman, and increased hunting performance among others. Over millennia, as the amount of humanity’s collective wealth increased this way the nature of wealth changed....
