I will troll her until kingdom come.

You see, I used to cover her at the Philippine Competition Commission when she was still a commissioner there. She was one of my favorite commissioners to put on a hot seat during press conferences (the other one is Comm Joey Bernabe). I used to love covering both of them and she once told me that I keep them on their toes whenever I attend their presscons. She was really good and made sense. Her specialization at the UP School of Economics was health economics—everything that concerns private healthcare funding, universal healthcare, public health finance, etc.

Then she ran for congress.

She’s now swallowed by the system (or maybe there was a corrupt politician hiding in her all along) and has co-authored the bill that would create the Marcos slush fund a.k.a. the 1MDB 2.0.

What are sovereign wealth funds? These are created by states so that their excess reserves can go somewhere more productive instead of sitting in the national treasury. What states have excess funds in an age of budget deficits? Oil countries. Malaysia, Norway, Kuwait and other Middle Eastern states.

What is a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF)?

A Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) is a state-owned investment fund or entity that is commonly established from:

• Balance of payments surpluses
• Official foreign currency operations
• The proceeds of privatizations
• Governmental transfer payments
• Fiscal surpluses
• And/or receipts resulting from resource exports

And as a public finance and macroeconomy reporter of 8+ years, let me tell you this:

1. We used to log BOP surpluses but that changes month on month. I used to do magic and produce news articles just from a table of national current accounts (oh the pain of writing BOP stories)…. BUT it’s more frequent that the numbers are in ( ).
2. We privatize government assets because we are always short on cash.
3. We didn’t have fiscal surpluses. We never balanced our budget and the smallest budget deficit that finance reporters of my time recorded was PHP 60bn (if I remember it right) and that was before the global financial crisis. Arroyo had to backpedal on the zero-deficit plan because by 2008 our economy went shit.
4. Receipts from resource exports? We don’t have OIL AND GAS to export, unlike the countries I mentioned above. Our mineral resources aren’t generating enough receipts for us to create an SWF. Indonesia has coal and nickel, while we have the low-grade variety of these minerals.

(Not well versed in govt forex operations and transfer payments as source of funds for SWF so I won’t touch on those).

Tapos obsessed na obsessed tong gobyernong to magtayo ng SWF, kala mo may excess funds tayo. HOYYYYYYYYYY we have always operated on a deficit. Kapal ng mukha netong mga to!

HOY STELLA! Slush fund ng Marcoses ang tinutulak mo. Di kami bobo.

To calm me down, I resorted to sketching this scene at the Singapore Botanical Gardens before I started editing today.

This government is driving me nuts.

I bought more frames when I was at the Mall of Asia/Ikea. Just because. If I produce a decent sketch or painting of something, maybe I can frame it and give it as a gift.

And I bought a wok as a gift to my cousin who wanted a paella pan (but I couldn’t find it.