Today, we’re not dealing with the usual banking, finance, and market alphabet-soup here.
B2B is a contraction for Back to Basics. Among the many lessons we have learned from the ongoing health menace and lockdown, is that we need to go back to basics.
It’s like an awakening that encompasses everything: in our daily routine. It has changed our outlook, be it in our relationships with our family, taking care and handling the people around us, including friends and individuals not necessarily blood related but close to us.
Now, more than ever, we value the very fiber of our existence, our family, relatives, and friends, who, despite the twists and turns we’re all going through to fight this invisible enemy, are still there to boost and support us. It has taught us to shift through the surface. Like in gold panning, a miner has to shift through the gravel and sand to get to the precious nuggets.
“It’s not only how we deal and dwell in our daily routine, it’s also B2B in banking,” one of my favorite market analyst told me in one of our e-conversations.
Due to the first recently signed second Bayanihan We Heal as One, banks, financial institutions, and other lenders may yet feel the degree of the pain that the pandemic is bearing on the economy. Bayanihan 1 and 2 provide the borrowers and other corporates the leeway to meet and stretch out the period of settling their obligations.
And it’s not classified as restructuring yet.
It also was B2B for President Duterte. I was startled in his speech before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) the other day, not on the issue of the much-reported entanglement in the South China Sea but on the basic principle of the association that is celebrating its diamond foundation.
The Chief Executive said we’re at a crossroads, as all of the member economies address the health menace. “We need to ask hard and fundamental questions about the vision and the mission that the United Nations conceptualized 75 years ago… whether or not we have remained true and faithful to the United Nations principles and ideals.”
And, rightly so!
This brings me to BTS. It stands for Bangtan Sonyeondan, the most popular Korean boy band that currently rules all social media platforms. A couple of years ago, I didn’t know BTS from Adam, neither do I follow Korean Telenovela, which apparently was already the craze here. Abel, Pangga, Jacky, Eloisa, Irma, Corrie, and Zinnia admonished me because they are fanlings.
It was only in 2018 that I realized how heavy is BTS direct contribution to the South Korea economy after the listening to one of the lecture-sessions of the World Knowledge Forum, which I attend annually. Early this month, BTS hugged the limelight as the first ever boyband in this part of the world to top the BillBoard chart with their song “Dynamite.”
BTS leader RM confessed how COVID-19 turned their lives from a stage where everything seems limitless to a four-corner room. For all their popularity and richness, the virus made them realize that life has become “simple… and unpredictable.”
Salute to the UNICEF for tapping BTS in its, motivational fight against COVID-19: that this is not a last crisis, especially for children and young people. Life goes on. BTS, for me, is a good ambassador for this cause.
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