If there is anyone less qualified to give accurate financial and investment advice than I am. I’d like to meet him or her.  I am not qualified to offer financial, investment or tax advice.  That said I do have a few qualifications that many of your better know commentators and advisers don’t have … I live here in the Philippines and I earn money here (although not from Philippine sources … an important distinction).

You might be shocked just how much of every news broadcast, every talk show and every newspaper here is devoted to US news.  The Philippines may have had its independence since 1946 but the times to the US, both emotionally and financially are very strong.  From a financial standpoint this closeness is unlikely to change any time soon, good times or bad the US economy is always the 800 pound gorilla in the room that sits where he pleases.

Philippine Central Bank

But a great many thing Filipino are not carbon copies of the US.  While we hear incessantly of yet another US investment firm collapsing because they bought ridiculously worthless paper ‘derivatives’ of other paper, yet another high-level trusted executive perpetrating scams on hapless consumers that would make Charles Ponzi blush and yet another $15 million a year auto executive who demonstrably hasn’t the business acumen to operate a lemonade stand … you won’t see many of these shenanigans here.

With the notable exception of Rural banks … which I’ll devote an article to real soon now … Philippine banking laws are very strict … as US banking laws used to be some years back.  Likewise the regulation of the securities market is highly regulated with many checks and balances … Philippine investment firm executives would go to jail if they tried to pull off the scams that companies like Morgan Stanley did.  Quite interestingly, the Philippine subsidiaries of some US giants, like AIG (PhilAm Life, one of only two world-wide subsidiaries of AIG that is being sold to liquidate the debt of the rest of the company) and Citibank Philippines not only aren’t standing in line for government handouts but instead have had profitable years.  Whether this is due to the stricter regulations or the better business judgment of their execs or to some other factor I’ll let others decide, but Citibank Philippines is actively recruiting for more than a thousand high-level IT positions, not just call center workers.

Will it stay that way in 2009?  I frankly have no idea … and anyone who tells you he does is likely grasping at straws, but for now I’m very happy with what I see here in the economy.

Many of the predicted contractions have been in the OFW (Overseas Filipino Workers) area, situations like Saudi Arabia, shocked that their oil has lost more than half its expected value, have jettisoned some workers and sent them home.  I’m sure there are some families with hard times ahead, but the Philippine government has already opened some huge infrastructure projects specifically to employ displaced OFW’s on needed government roads, bridges and buildings.

Actions like that may be of interest to wage earners in desperate straits in the US who have heard nothing whatever from the government, Secretary Paulson who apparently runs the US without benefit of any presidential oversight is still pouring money down the open sewer of his former Wall Street cronies.  Heard either the incoming out outgoing presidential teams tell you anything concrete about employing the millions who may lose their jobs if the ill-advised Detroit bailout fails as badly as Paulsen’s Wall Street Santa Claus program?

I sure haven’t, and this would be one of the areas I would most like to be proved wrong in … but when I contrast government regulations that protect the non-insiders of business and how a government plans to help it’s common people through crisis rather than members of specific Political Action Committees, I’m pretty darn glad I’ll be spending 2009 here in the Philippines.

Tune back in 385 days from now and I’ll do a “Warren Buffett” that is giving myself a grade on my predictions. Paulson, in my view you already get an ‘F’ and come this time next year you’ll be back on Wall Street perpetrating more scams on the public, so you’re not invited.

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