It would, therefore, be the height of irresponsibility for the head of a poor family to gamble, even in business, earnings that can hardly support a hand-to-mouth existence.
The Philippines is one such family. It is so poor that it is unable to provide many of its members, some 30 million of them, with life’s basic necessities. Yet, this family’s head is making a move through minions in Congress, to set up the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) via House Bill 6398 that would gamble away our meager funds in high-risk investments.
Wealthy nations usually put up what is generically called a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) out of their excess funds. They are justified in expanding their wealth by gambling what anyway are excess funds in high-risk, high-return investment ventures.
But we are not a wealthy nation, not by any stretch of the imagination. How can Marikina Rep. Stella Quimbo, one of HB 6398’s authors, not see the contradiction of risking the little we have in order to supplement what she admits is not enough for our basic needs?
Which brings up a doubter’s question: Whose wealth really are they expanding with essential (not excess) funds? The success of a SWF depends on tight legal safeguards and on the integrity of people managing it. Legal safeguards are easy, but government officials who are not distinguished for their integrity can just as easily skip them. Besides, poor Filipinos who will suffer the most from the MIF’s misuse or shortfall but don’t know where to get their next meal will be clueless and unmindful of it.
Hence, the likelihood is great we will wake up one day to find the fund’s earnings in the bank accounts of government officials/fund managers while its losses are hidden in the fund’s various sources. It does not help to allay our fear of this happening that the MIF is the brainchild of President Marcos Jr. who, like his late dictator-father, is nowhere near being a paragon of integrity.
Many oppose the MIF for a variety of other reasons. I oppose it for the economic imperative that a poor country must not gamble funds needed for people’s basic needs. For where else will the P110 billion come from now that SSS and GSIS are out? And where will the poor live, what will they eat while waiting for the fund’s returns, if at all there are returns and these do not end up in the pockets of the corrupt.
HB 6398 should be scrapped. No amount of tweaking and window dressing can make it any less irresponsible, pretentious, and ridiculous an idea. Leaders should focus instead on how to bring the region’s poorest country’s highest inflation rate down.