Home Banking
FINANCE Secretary Cesar V. Purisima bared a plan on Tuesday to hike the paid-up capital of pre-need companies five times more where they are at present as part of a larger effort to rebuild diminishing confidence in an industry that sells billions of pesos worth of pension, education and memorial plans every year.
Purisima is chairman at the Insurance Commission (IC) where former insurance executive Emmanuel Dooc is its current chief.
THE writing is on the wall that we can only expect the government to lower interest rates further in the coming months or even weeks. There seems to be sufficient justification in doing this given the low inflation rate and the international ratings upgrade we had which is just one notch shy from being investment grade. The Philippines also had weak merchandise exports in 2011, with no sign of improving in the near term, further adding to the justification that the Bangko Sentral should lower interest rates to see a somewhat weaker peso which should help improve our export performance.
INVESTMENT-HUNGRY bond investors offered to buy from government nearly four times more long-dated IOUs than the Bureau of Treasury (BTr) was willing to sell on Tuesday, its sale of seven-year bonds having been swamped with buy offers reaching P32.727 billion.
Treasury chief Roberto Tan was prepared to sell no more than P9 billion worth of Treasury bonds which he expected to cost the government no more than 5 percent a year to service over that seven-year stretch.
