I drove all the way from QC to Makati for this event where they were talking about the Maharlika Investment Fund a.k.a. Marcos Family Slush Fund. I was early, thinking that I would be able to talk to some people before the program starts.

Sorry, no media allowed, I was told.

Oh wow. This is the first time this organizer banned media. Banned us when they were tackling a very important topic. 🙄

Something fishy going on here.

So I tried to stalk people outside the ballroom, which I had been doing since 2006.

But damn it, there was no place to sit and wait. I’m getting old for this shit. After an hour, I gave up and just went to Greenbelt 5 to The Craft Central to make my trip south worthwhile.

Of course I had to try them.

Meanwhile, my contractor told me that we can’t avoid cutting down the jackfruit tree. It’s getting in the way of the the posts of my stairs.

I don’t know what happened to me but I just slept almost the whole day today. Good thing there was only one story to edit. I have three stories to write but they can wait, except for one that I finished tonight.

Maybe my body was compensating for the uneasy sleep I had during my entire stay in Singapore. Maybe my body is recovering from colds. I still feel groggy right now.

I prepared some viands last night so these can be ready to cook in the following two days. First dish is the marinated porkchop that would become bistek tagalog. The second one was katsudon. I breaded chicken breasts and froze them for frying today.

I wanted to do something with my hands but my brain is still sleepy so I just started an initial sketch. I couldn’t push myself to start painting because if the creative drive is not there, I will end up with horrendous output.

I’ll just wait for the creative bug to bite me tomorrow.

Believe it or not, I’m sleepy again…

I have seen only one bank run in my life (Orient Bank) and the debate in the newsrooms whether is it ethical to write a story that would result to a bank run goes on. Essentially, bank runs are self-fulfilling prophecies where you tell people that this bank does not have enough liquidity as buffer for all the risks it took. Of course, it would trigger withdrawals from depositors.

This is the second bank run I had witnessed and this unraveled on the same day I was listening to a hedge fund guy talk about how companies manipulate their books. How ironic.

Here’s how the second-biggest bank collapse in U.S. history happened in just 48 hours

CNBC.com

“This was a hysteria-induced bank run caused by VCs,” Ryan Falvey, a fintech investor of Restive Ventures, told CNBC.

The series of rate hikes by US Fed has created so much credit tightening that more and more companies needed liquidity to keep them afloat. VC-backed firms could not do their series fundraising so they needed to extend their runways or they die. They needed to withdraw cash. The problem is not everyone has enough cash to go around and the sin of Silicon Valley Bank is that it didn’t have enough buffer.

This is where Asian banks have proven to be resilient, as they got burned by the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998. Some banks here in the Philippines have complained that the Philippine central bank has been so strict with capital adequacy ratios and other capital requirements and that some of them are even way above the industry average. This saved basically the region from having the same degree of meltdown like in the West in 2008-2009. It did redound to us but securitized mortgage debts imploding in your face in Asia was not that widespread as in the US at that time. We did, however, suffer from the economic slowdown global recession that ensued.

It was just right for the BSP to be strict about capitalization because you have to have enough buffer for all the risks that you take. Especially now that interest rates have jumped so high that many borrowers may not be able to service their debts. The macroeconomic environment has become so hostile that SMEs have to look for ways to sustain themselves and at the same time they need to continue servicing their obligations. What if all these borrowers default on their loans or worse, go belly up? What would a bank do?

As the hedge fund guy told us over breakfast last week, this crisis is different from the others in the sense that it is very much tied to macroeconomics. Unlike in the GFC of 2008-2009, which was instigated by loose credit standards (as a result of very cheap money that the US Fed unleashed in prior years), this current one is tied to a very tangible metric–INFLATION–and the equally devastating tool to tame it = climbing interest rates.

The Volcker years (late 1970s to early 1980s) at the US Fed didn’t give single fuck to anybody at that time. The US Fed had hiked interest rates so much (Volcker Shock) to keep inflation down. Inflation has plagued much of the world, especially in the US, in the 1970s with the oil crisis raging on (caused by geopolitics and redounded to worsening geopolitics). So it seems like this time is no different because we had commodities price shocks and a war going on that warped everything from logistics to supplies. Then we see the seemingly unending interest rate hikes. Then, like a classic economics textbook case, stagflation will enter the picture.

During the GFC of 2008-2009, I was in the center of it all. I remember listening to a European banker who told us way back in 2006 that the US will have a housing crisis given the subprime mortgages that have become unsustainable. It was a bad time but it was the best time to be a business journalist. I had been the on the front page of my newspaper for three straight days writing about the fall of Lehman Brothers and the AIG breakup, which affected one of the country’s biggest insurance companies. The local stock market bled like it has never bled before. However, at that time I didn’t understand how the short-sellers made a big mess or how much of a genius they were. I only understood after I read The Big Short. But still, the adrenaline rush was different.

This time, I’m in the middle of it again but on a much bigger platform. I will be deep in bigger crap and I need to be smarter in picking which battles to write about. Learning about the accounting red flags during the workshops last week excited me. This time I now understand how short-sellers have started to destroy Adani (which is a separate matter from the ongoing crisis but this could be tied together in the end). It fired me up learning about the things this hedge fund guy told us about the things to watch out for now that this crisis is starting to implode.

This is terrible overall but oh my goodness, there has never been a better time to be a business journalist than at this moment.

This Singapore trip was jinxed from the very beginning. Little things have gone wrong the entire trip but they’ve added up. They were small annoying things that I didn’t bother blog about.

So then on my last day, I bought a bag from Fossil but it was incomplete and I only realized that when I was already at the train going to the airport. Aside from that, I only had 30 mins to spare to eat before they started to open the gates for boarding. My last meal was around 11 am. I just had coffee at 1 pm so I was already low on sugar by 6pm.

At Terminal 2 at NAIA, I had my SGD exchanged to PHP at a good rate but… I dropped my atm cards and didn’t realize it until my Grab was already at Edsa Makati/Rockwell. The girl at the money changer messaged me (found me on FB) and told me that my main atm cards had fallen off my wallet at 1+ am. I was just so tired from clearing Immigration because the queue was long since there weren’t enough gates and another long-bodied plane arrived from either the US or Australia = passengers started choking BI.

I had asked the Grab driver to turn around to claim them so I had to pay double my original fare. Got home at 2+ am but slept at past 3 because I had to get rid of my dirty clothes or else I won’t be able to bring up my luggage that was around 19kg heavy. My year-old Delsey is very tempting for my cats that had made everything their scratching posts.

I was just so tired the entire day. Stayed in bed and did little else but chat with a former nanny of my girls who now works as a housemaid in Oman. More of that later. My cats missed me so much that they stuck to me like glue in my room, same with my girls.

I had a two-hr Zennya massage and zonked out. So here I am at 1:30 am…

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G worked for me as a nanny to Twin A. She and R left (when the girls were almost 3 years old) because of the girls’ dad who didn’t treat them well (she just revealed it to me today).

Long story short, she ended up in Oman as a housemaid but her employer holds her passport. Her original contract lapsed and was sold off (yes, her term) to another abusive employer so she can pay off her placement fees with the agency that brought her to Oman.

She is basically a slave because 1) she doesn’t have a contract with her current employer (one of the many ways a placement agency fucks with undereducated Filipinos); 2) her passport is held hostage by her employer; 3) she only earns PhP 20k and she has to pay for her toiletries and those things add up. She sends 15k to her family (older brother and sister, ageing mother, and her 7-yr old son) a month. She is the only one with a job and this culture of mendicancy is killing Filipinos.

She tries to save 1k a month for emergencies for her child but there are always fuck ups that drain her savings. Like her 32-yr-old brother is undergoing dialysis for stage 5 chronic kidney disease. They had to pull him out of the hospital because they couldn’t pay. He no longer has a functioning kidney or little else was functioning. Dialysis is PHP 2500 per session and he needs to have it 3x a week. G is hopeful he can have a kidney replacement but I told her kidney donation is so remote that it’s basically a death warrant. Kidney donations here have come mostly from family members and yet the kidneys still get rejected. Moreover, people are known to fly to China to sell kidneys because of the lucrative human organ trade in that part of the world.

I can’t straight away tell her brother will soon die. Dialysis that they cannot afford will not sustain him. A kidney operation costs 100k.

I had given her some little financial assistance but what I’m doing now for her is much bigger. 1) she lost 9k from messes with Gcash (that e-wallet is 90% unreliable) so I had contacted friends there to help sort it out; 2) contacted a fellow journo at ABS-CBN whose beat was labor/overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to help in releasing her from her situation in Oman.

G complained to POEA about her agency but all she got were threats that she will be put to jail and her phone taken away. She said the embassy always sides with the placement agencies and the Omani government has no fucks to give to foreign domestic workers. Well, basically all MENA governments don’t have any fucks to give. Period.

Mind you, there are hundreds and thousands of OFWs in the MENA area who are enslaved by the system. Their passports are held by employers who physically beat or rape housemaids. They get paid so little. Many have their cellphones confiscated and cut off from families. G only gets 30 mins to eat and little rest. She locks herself up in her room to avoid being beaten or raped. She goes to the supermarket to buy shampoo and send remittance but that’s it. She doesn’t want to get nabbed by the police for working without a contract and they do random checks regularly. OFWs like G are made to believe they owe the placement agencies thousands so they are basically tied forever to working without contracts.

I told G that once she gets to go home in December (she is being positive here) have a little money of her own and I can add to it so she can put up her canteen back home. I don’t know how she can cough up 30k in airfare but I don’t want to rain down on her hopes. All I am trying to do now is have her repatriated home for free.

G said she is remorseful that she didn’t take up my offer to send her to school. Another Filipino employer offered to send her to nursing school at night. She was being pig-headed and thought going to MENA is a ticket way out of poverty but she realized that with little education, she is just stuck as a housemaid forever. At least if she finished high school, she could have had a better job at the supermarkets in Saudi or Kuwait. She said working for factories in S.Korea or Taiwan required a college degree.

The Philippine economy is propped up by slaves. Our source of forex are stuck in their rooms and live in fear of being raped or beaten up. USD 37bn a year from the likes of them. Singapore-based maids are in the same situation. One Filipino maid was so malnourished that she only weighed 80lbs, fed only watered down instant noodles and little bread. She was locked up in her room, her passport held. She was released because a neighbor sounded off the authorities.

And here I am, close to having my maid finish college… And she got pregnant 🤦‍♀️ that’s another story for another day. All I’m saying now is, what kind of future will she have with only 3rd year college education?

I was debating whether I should go to Marina Bay to sketch or go for a literal cooler option (because it’s hot on the deck at Marina Bay) and go to a mall like Vivo City. I did go for the latter option but was disheartened by the generic look of the area and there’s nowhere to sit.

Then I went to Orchard Road, an area teeming with tourists with benches where I can station myself.

I was fascinated by the geometric shapes and the changing angles/depths. I also want to try if I can pull off painting glass with watercolor.

My flight back to Manila is at 20:00H so I still have 7 hrs to kill. I wanted to reserve Singapore Botanical Garden next month since I have an entire weekend to waste for such pursuits. I don’t want to expend my energy by walking so much, so sketching along Orchard Rd is just right. Besides, it’s along the train line back to my hotel.

Let’s see what I can come up with today.

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I am human. 🫠 A woman.

40% off.

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The Philippine e-Travel registration is so annoying. It still asks for vaccination details and I f*cking don’t remember them. Other countries like Singapore no longer ask for these things while we remain 10 years behind again. 😡 I don’t even know if the vaccines two years ago are still effective. I mean the gov’t continues to ask for obsolete details, which is ridiculous.

I left my cardigan at the hotel lobby when I was transfering bags and stuffing my luggage with my new purchase. Now I’m cold. ❄️

I took my time this morning in getting ready for office. It’s like flu but not yet flu. I’m miserable. I arrived at my table at already 10:30 am but I was already answering emails at 8 am. 🫠 Thank God it’s the weekend.

At past 1 pm I was already freezing so I went into one of the small rooms that had been benefitting from natural solar heat and took a nap. It was really a terrible feeling.

I could have worked in my hotel room but I was meeting a freelancer candidate for interview at 5 pm and my ex-colleague friend for dinner at 8 pm. I need to tough it out today.

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