President Marcos has cited the futility of spending the country's foreign reserves to defend the Philippine peso, which recently further weakened, hitting a new record low of P60.30 against the US dollar.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Marcos stressed that the dollar's movement is linked to the United States being the largest oil producer in the world.

He added that propping up the peso using foreign reserves would be futile.

"As a matter of policy, we defend the peso to a certain extent, but with the dollar moving the way it is— and it's moving; whereas before the dollar was seen as a safe harbor currency. When you look deeper into it, the dollar's movement increase in value has been really because they're the largest oil producer, and that's why that is," Marcos said.

"And considering that, then we have to— I think it would be even futile to try to spend all of this, all of our foreign reserves on defending the peso," he stressed.

He also cited that the impact of the war in the Middle East is on the middle-income and the lower-middle-income countries, like the Philippines, which is a middle-income country.

The President also said that while remittances are paid in dollars, it does not make up for the currency's depreciation.

Marcos believes the country would still manage to achieve a 6 to 7 percent gross domestic product (GDP) growth.

"We believe we can. I mean, we were forecasting for the year 2026, we were going to manage between 6 and 7 percent. And that figure was something that we came up with internally, but the other financing institutions and the banks also seem to have had the same opinion," he said.

However, Marcos added,  with the war in the Middle East, everything has to be redrawn.

"Then, of course, oil. Oil does what it does, but it was fairly steady at $72 per barrel for a good while. So that's those are the bases that we were calculating. Right now, things change every day. So we have to model that and recalculate that. So we will have to see how long this problem lasts, how long it will take to adjust," he said.

The President cited investment as key to meeting the target.

"Of course, it's investment. Because when it comes to production, perhaps our largest, our largest export in dollar terms is semiconductors. And that has been a very important part," he said.

"And we have now moved away— not away, but up the value chain from just pure fabrication to design. And that has put us in a very good position for the advent of data centers, of AI. And investment, of course, is most important as well," he added.