‘‘I think they are turning the corner,” said Warner Manning, the British president and chief executive officer of HSBC in the Philippines, wearing a barong tagalog, the traditional Filipino dress shirt, in his office in the Makati business district of Manila. That was in May. A few months later, the picture is less clear. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is under siege over a publicised tape of her talking inappropriately to an election official in 2004. Her husband and son have been sent into exile over allegations of payments in a numbers game. Demonstrations against her and for her occur weekly.
Yet, despite all this drama, overall the situation remains more encouraging than the news reports imply. “The macroeconomic fundamentals have remained generally sound,” says Amando Tetangco Jr, the central bank governor, speaking in his office with the ubiquitous Bloomberg, Reuters and Telerate screens. “The improvements, particularly on the fiscal side, are intact. What we need to do is build on our recent economic gains by sustaining our economic reform efforts.”
