OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT Diwa C. Guinigundo We certainly are not Hamlet to contemplate on whether it is better to live or to die. It is quite obvious for us to keep safe and stay healthy. We all want to live unless we give more weight to Hamlet’s musing that life is lack of power. Some of us must...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT Diwa C. Guinigundo In our last column for 2020, we called on the Philippine authorities not to drop the ball this year. It’s 2021. There’s no more time to catch up; we are in the last quarter of the game. Even a full-court press, man to man guarding of every political or...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT Diwa C. Guinigundo Heard over the morning edition of the National Public Radio last December 28, Patti Neighmond wrote an extremely informative article “Still Disinfecting Surfaces? It Might Not be Worth It.” It was unquestionably refreshing to know we are learning more...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT (Last of two parts) That old family mirror my father used in his youth was my father himself during the Japanese occupation. In some of his more popular short stories, as critics and scholars observed, like Teodoro Agoncillo (Mga Piling Kuwento 1886-1948), there were no...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT (First of two parts) My father is Serafin Cruz Guinigundo, Apin to his friends, whom everybody thought was a fool for reciting Filipino poetry for hours before an old family mirror one summer afternoon. He commandeered it and carried it down and placed it under a fruit...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT (Last of two parts) Last week’s column discussed the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety, given its rather short vetting period. This limited testing time also makes it premature to immediately call for their free-flowing supply. It is incumbent for country leaders to...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT (First of two parts) At the beginning of August, 2020, we wrote in this column the imperative to think and act outside the vax. If other nations’ authorities managed to mitigate the pandemic’s ruthless consequences on their people’s lives and livelihood, keep recession...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT Last week, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) surprised everyone by introducing a new logo “in keeping with the changing times.” Since then, social media has been abuzz with comments, feedback, and even memes. The public raised issue not just with the design....
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has done enough and should be more careful in dispensing monetary stimulus or risk financial instability, according to an ex-central bank official. “Monetary policy should guard against itself,” said former BSP Deputy Governor Diwa C. Guinigundo,...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT National Ocean Service (NOS) of the US Department of Commerce has one interesting distinction between weather and climate and it can never be clearer than “climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), on-line news...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT Diwa C. Guinigundo Donald Trump was at the receiving end of all kinds of insults and shaming available in the playbook, from his economic and trade policies to foreign policy, or the lack of it, to his handling of the pandemic crisis. Yet, not a few were surprised at his...
OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT The broadsheets recently reported that the uncertainty of the pandemic-induced economic fallout led banks to tighten their lending policies. Extracted from the BSP’s own quarterly survey of senior bank loan officers for Q3 2020, the bad news was that most respondent banks...
