STATE-ADMINISTERED Home Development Mutual Fund, also known as Pag-IBIG Fund, has delayed its P12-billion bond offering, originally scheduled for launching in October, as it seeks to change the features of the deal.

“We’re now targeting December or January next year for the launch,” president and chief executive officer Jaime Fabiaña said on Thursday.

Pag-IBIG has decided to drop the initial plan to offer the bonds in two tranches and instead raise the whole amount in a single transaction, he said in a phone interview.

The initial plan was to launch the first tranche of P7 billion, which would be swapped for Pag-IBIG bonds maturing May 2010, and offer a second tranche worth P5 billion to augment funds for lending.

PHILIPPINE National Bank (PNB) said on Thursday its nine-month net profit jumped 134 percent to a record P2.11 billion from the same period last year, putting it on track to end the year with bottom-line income at its highest level in 12 years.

Net interest income rose by 30 percent to P6 billion, boosted by increased lending and wider interest margins.

Total loans and receivables increased by 24 percent to P113.9 billion, with both the corporate and consumer loan segments contributing to growth, it said in a statement.

“The share of loans total assets went up from 33 percent in December 2008 to 40 percent in September 2009,” it said. “As a result, the deployment of funds to higher-yielding assets improved the bank’s interest margins.”

ONE need not have a degree in economics—with a fundamental working knowledge of the law of supply and demand—to know that price controls never quite work or give the results. First of all, if products are sourced locally, producers would balk at selling below their cost of production. Middlemen have to make their own mark-ups, and the retailers add to the cost of the product. Any disruption in the supply chain will result in dislocations in the marketplace.

My economics professors back in college would blanch at the thought of price controls being imposed on necessary commodities. This was a common practice in the socialist states before the ’90s, and we saw what happened in the marketplace: long queues for nonexistent or rare products; shoddy products that displayed poor workmanship; an active black market that sought to supply (for a fee) the products not available in the market; and production lines that had no incentive to produce superior goods or to resort to innovation or invention.