TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 12 August 2026) — Sometimes the economy does not announce trouble with one dramatic headline. Instead, the headlines arrive separately. GDP growth slows to 2.3 percent. Unemployment rises to 4.9 percent. Investment contracts. Foreign direct investment
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 09 August 2026) — I pulled an old publication from my files the other day. The pages have begun to show their age. The photographs belong unmistakably to another era. The typography alone takes you back. But
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 5 August 2026) — For a few precious hours last week, the country stopped worrying about the price of rice. We stopped calculating whether the salary would reach the next payday, whether the electricity bill could
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 02 August 2026) — Every President delivers six State of the Nation Addresses. Only one usually matters most. The fifth. It is the last opportunity to launch major reforms before politics overtakes governance and the next presidential
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 29 July 2026) — The State of the Nation Address has ended. The applause has faded. The social media debates continue. Supporters celebrate. Critics criticize. Politicians return to their respective camps. But for ordinary Filipino families,
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 26 July 2026) – Every morning, a modern city performs a small act of magic. We place our garbage outside. A truck arrives. The bags disappear. By breakfast, the street is clean. We rarely ask where
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 22 July 2026) — Every Wednesday, I ask the same question after reading the week’s business headlines: So what now? This week, five major stories appeared almost simultaneously. At first glance, these seem unrelated. They are
TAGUIG CITY(MindaNews/20 July 2026)– The World Bank’s warning is blunt: waste is no longer just a sanitation problem. It is now a climate problem, a public finance problem, a flooding problem, a plastics problem, and a test of whether cities
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 15 July 2026) — Most Filipinos will never meet a foreign investor. They will never attend an investment forum in Singapore or Tokyo. They will never read the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ Foreign Direct Investment statistics.
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 12 July 2026) — We like to explain expensive vegetables in the simplest possible way. A typhoon came. Fertilizer became costly. Traders manipulated supply. The road was bad. The farmer planted too little, or too much, or
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews/8 July 2026)– On paper, the Philippine economy appears to be doing many things right. Economic growth remains among the strongest in Southeast Asia. Inflation has eased considerably from its painful highs. Unemployment is relatively low. More tourists
BOOK REVIEW | Witnessing: Three Decades of FaithBukas Loob sa Diyos Catholic Covenanted Community-District of DavaoEdited by Nikki Gomez and Des Mendoza-LopezPublished by BLD Davao Foundation, Inc., 2026 TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 6 July 2026) — Many anniversary books fail
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 05 July 2026) — Upper-Middle Income Is Not the Finish Line. It Is the Hard Part. On July 2, 2026, the World Bank reclassified the Philippines as an upper-middle-income economy. It is a milestone worth acknowledging. It reflects
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 1 July 2026) — Imagine watching a basketball game. One referee blows the whistle. The crowd boos. Fans argue. Coaches protest. Maybe the referee simply made a bad call. Then a second referee whistles for the
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 28 June 2026) — Walk into a café in New York. Or London. Or Sydney. Or Singapore. Somewhere between the matcha lattes and oat milk cappuccinos, chances are you will find something unmistakably Filipino. An ube
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 21 June 2026) — There are roads that bring people home. And there are roads that become history. The road from Davao City to Talacogon, Agusan del Sur was once familiar to Rene Clert “Bobet” Baterbonia.
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 17 June 26 ) – The invisible chain connecting a conflict thousands of kilometers away to the grocery cart in your neighborhood. When news breaks about missiles over the Middle East, central bankers in Europe, trade
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 14 June 2026) –The earth moved, and for a few terrible moments, it reminded us of a truth we spend much of our lives trying to forget: We are temporary tenants of a restless landscape. The
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 10 June 2026) — The headline sounds encouraging: Unemployment fell for the third straight month. But if you stop reading there, you miss the more important story. The deeper story is that while fewer Filipinos are
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 07 June 2026). El Niño always arrives first as a forecast. A percentage on a PAGASA slide.A probability line moving from 55 percent to 79 percent to 92 percent.A warning dressed in technical language: weak, strong, very
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 03 June 2026) — Every economy has numbers. Growth rate. Inflation rate. Exchange rate. Interest rate. Unemployment rate. Debt ratio. Budget deficit. These numbers matter. They tell us whether the machinery is running hot, slowing down, overheating,
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews/31 May 2026)– Mindanao has always been described through the abundance of what it possesses. Land. Water. Forests. Farms. Minerals. Energy. Ports. Coastlines. Young cities. Open spaces. Strategic location. A bridge to ASEAN. A breadbasket. A power source.
TAGUIG CITY (27 May 2026) —The numbers are now too large to feel real. ₱18.488 trillion in national government outstanding debt as of March 2026. Around ₱164,000 for every Filipino. Nearly ₱675,000 per household. At some point, numbers stop behaving
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 24 March 2026) — For decades, Philippine agriculture has often suffered from a familiar disease: we discover problems only after the harvest has failed, after prices have risen, after floods have submerged farms, after drought has
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 20 May 2026) — The good news is easy to headline: foreign investment pledges in the Philippines rose by 52.3 percent in the first quarter of 2026. The harder question is what that number really means.
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 17 May 2026) — The numbers are not dramatic because they are surprising. They are dramatic because they are ordinary. In OCTA Research’s Q1 2026 survey, adult Filipinos were asked what personal concerns government must act
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews /13 May) — There are economic slowdowns that feel cyclical. Temporary. Recoverable with time, lower oil prices, or better global conditions. And then there are slowdowns that expose deeper structural weakness. The Philippines’ first-quarter 2026 GDP growth of
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 10 May 2026) –The Philippine agricultural story is not one of simple decline. The recent PSA (Philippine Statistics Authority) numbers tell a more complicated truth: the sector is still alive, still producing, still recovering in some
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 6 May 2026) — There are weeks when the economy whispers. There are weeks when it speaks clearly. And then there are weeks like this—when it shouts. April 2026 is not just another bad inflation print.
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 03 May) — I was not born into abstraction. I was born into place. Before I knew the word Mindanao, before geography became map or memory became sentence, I had already been claimed by water, church bells,
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 29 April) — There are charts that whisper. This one shouts. The latest Business Confidence Index from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas shows something more troubling than a normal dip in sentiment. It shows a break.
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 26 April) — The latest regional accounts carry a quiet but important message: the Philippine economy is no longer just a Manila story. In 2025, all 18 regional economies posted growth. National gross domestic product (GDP)
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 22 April) — When Fitch Ratings shifts its outlook on the Philippines to “negative,” it does not stay in the headlines. It quietly works its way into your loan, your job, and your grocery bill. What’s
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 19 April) — The Strait of Hormuz was open again, they said. Then, just as quickly, it was not quite open after all. That is the trouble with crises of this kind: the headline changes faster
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 15 April) — Right after my session with my rheumatologist, I did what many Filipinos did yesterday: I lined up at a fuel station for a full tank. It was late afternoon. Traffic was still heavy.
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 12 April) — Singapore’s warning and Bam Aquino’s Senate reminder point to the same conclusion: for the Philippines, resilience in fuel, power, food, and logistics is no longer separate from national security. The New Security Map
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 8 April) — By the time this column appears on Wednesday, the newest fuel-price hike will already have landed. That matters. Because by then, this is no longer a forecast, a projection, or a late-night headline
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 05 April) — As conflict in the Middle East widens, the Vatican’s appeal for restraint is not just a moral plea. For countries like the Philippines, it is also a warning about energy insecurity, economic exposure,
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 1 April) — We Filipinos are good at filing away distant wars under the category of ‘Nakakaalarma, but not yet my problem.’ Until diesel goes up. Until the tricycle fare feels heavier. Until the vegetables look
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews /29 March) — There is a quiet but unsettling message coming from global markets this week. When war breaks out, investors are supposed to run to safety. Gold rises. Bonds steady. Defensive assets hold the line. This
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 25 March) –“Breathe in, breathe out… is it really over?” For a few hours this week, the world seemed to exhale. Oil prices dipped. Stocks recovered. Headlines softened. Parang tapos na. But look closer—and more importantly,
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 22 March) — In Mindanao, the calendar does not merely mark time—it reveals the architecture of our coexistence. There are years when Eid’l Fitr and Passiontide arrive almost side by side. When this happens, something quiet but
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 18 March) — The Philippine peso is quietly approaching a level many Filipinos once thought was unimaginable: ₱60 to one U.S. dollar. As of this week, the exchange rate has climbed to around ₱59.59 per dollar,
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 15 March) Skeptics would be justified in asking a fair question: haven’t we heard these ideas before? Renewable energy corridors, agro-industrial value chains, logistics modernisation, halal hubs, and diaspora investment have all appeared in development plans for Mindanao over
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 11 March) — On Tuesday morning at 6:00 a.m., the pump moved. Gasoline went up ₱5.20 per liter. On Wednesday morning at 6:00 a.m., it moved again. Another ₱3.60. By the time the second sunrise arrived,
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 08 March) — Every global crisis rearranges the economic map of the world. Wars shift shipping routes. Energy shocks reshape industries. Food shortages redefine which regions suddenly matter. What once seemed peripheral becomes central. What once looked
TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 1 March) — The morning after the 40th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution, I looked out from a balcony in our Davao residences and saw the soft, amber light catching on the windows of
When a leader chooses his last line carefully, it is rarely accidental. “Kaninyo, ako, magpabilin suluguon.” To you, I, remain a servant. In a document framed by legal defiance, sovereignty claims, and denunciations of international jurisdiction, the final words are
There were mornings in Cotabato when the air itself seemed to pray. Before sunrise, the city held its breath. The call to prayer unfurled from the minaret—long, liquid, unhurried—threading through the damp air above the Rio Grande. It slipped past
