OPINION Marcos 2.0 likely to accelerate Philippines’ backward slide Key watchpoints will be whether corruption and cronyism worsen William Pesek May 12, 2022 05:00 JST William Pesek is an award-winning Tokyo-based journalist and author of “Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan’s Lost Decades.” Pinpointing inflection points is hard enough in highly developed economies,
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FORBES William Pesek It’s become a cliché to point out that stock market rallies rarely reflect events in the real economy. Sometimes, though, surging valuations can be a contrarian indicator. Take Manila, where the Philippine Stock Exchange is on a tear. The market slumped in 2018 to become one of the globe’s worst performers. The 13% drop
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FORBES William Pesek Rodrigo Duterte’s efforts to cozy up to China these last few years isn’t paying the economic dividends the Philippines hoped. It all seemed so simple in June 2016, when Duterte grabbed the keys to the presidential palace from Benigno Aquino. His predecessor drew Manila close to Barack Obama’s America. In his six
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FORBES William Pesek “The Donald Trump of Asia.” That’s how the international media labeled Rodrigo Duterte in 2016, when the firebrand won the Philippine presidency. Turns out, it’s the other way around. True, Duterte’s shock election win predated the U.S. president’s by 183 days. But the strongman rallied voters with Trumpian bluster, anti-establishment populism and
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