WHILE the other top banks in the country are busy growing their size, including branch networks, Union Bank of the Philippines is doing the reverse by keeping only 300 branches and instead expanding through the digital platform.

In keeping with the times, as most global banks are doing, digitizing the entire system from loans, to withdrawals and deposits and money transfers are done at the touch of the finger through the smartphones.

As UBP President Edwin R. Bautista said, “in three years’ time if we don’t digitize we’ll die. The question is how soon it would be. But before we…

Read more: Union Bank goes digital to move ahead

SIZE does matter but in the government, a bloated bureaucracy could mean more problems resulting in long queues, rude clerks, delays and mistakes in the processing of vital documents and never ending tales of red tape.

With 1.3-million workforce, the country’s civil service is the Philippines’ largest employer even as payments for personnel services take the biggest chunk in the government’s annual national budget. 

The sad fact however is that majority of those in the government service are not qualified and unprepared to do their jobs since many of them are political…

Read more: DOWNSIZE BLOATED BUREAUCRACY

Economists schooled or trained by American institutions stick to cautious and market-driven depreciation of the peso to the US dollar. But Asian countries which really progressed a lot have used deliberate devaluation to grow their economies proving the scheme to be beneficial.

Immediately sectors that benefit from devaluation are the overseas Filipino workers, the exporters and the farmers who export their products to the world.  

Devaluation is a strategy used by Asia’s developing economies to better their export trade. Japan did that and so did South Korea.

Just recently, the United States of America (USA) got piqued by the…

Read more: DELIBERATE DEVALUATION IS GOOD

THE rape is over.

For the longest time, our mountains, forests and other natural resources have been abused by giant mostly foreign-owned mining firms, causing untold destruction and death in their areas of operation all over the country.

Certainly, something must be done to correct this horrible situation and it is good that the government specifically Environment Secretary Gina Lopez is taking these abusive mining firms by the horn.  

Marcopper and Other Mining Disasters

In 1996, 1.6 million cubic meters of toxic mine tailings from the Marcopper Mining Corporation spilled into the Boac River in Marinduque after a…

Read more: STOP THE RAPISTS