菲律宾经济危机：通胀飙升、增长放缓、信用降级

Not too long ago, the Philippine economy looked like it was doing pretty great, despite some fairly dysfunctional politics. The Philippines has consistently outperformed its regional peers with rapid GDP growth and, at least since the pandemic, relatively low inflation. As recently as August last year, the country's central bank chief was talking about a Goldilocks economy with low inflation and rapid growth. Less than a year later though, and the tables have completely turned.

Inflation is surging, growth is trending down, and the fiscal situation suddenly looks so precarious that earlier this year, one of the big credit ratings agencies, who basically assess the likelihood of default, downgraded the country for the first time since 2005. So, in this video, we're going to take a look at the Philippines' economic crisis and explain why it leaves the Filipino Central Bank with a difficult dilemma.

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Purchase your copy by clicking the link in the description. Now, at first glance, it might be tempting to chalk up the Philippines' recent economic woes entirely down to the war in Iran and the subsequent energy crisis. And while it's true that like most of Southeast Asia, the Philippines imports a lot of its oil from the Middle East, and has thus been badly affected by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but this isn't the whole story.

And the key thing to understand here, and the reason the Filipino economy looks shakier than most of its neighbors, is that the Filipino economy was already showing signs of strain before the crisis. The peso was slipping and GDP growth slowed consistently throughout 2025, going from over 5% year-on-year at the start to just 3% in the fourth quarter. This was mostly down to a scandal centered around alleged corruption over flood control projects, which had been rumbling on for a couple of years, but really came to a head in August when a month after severe flooding caused several deaths and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate Manila.

President Bongbong Marcos claimed that he had found financial irregularities in the contracts for the flood defense projects. Marcos' government launched an independent fact-finding to probe the allegations and congressional hearings in the months since have implicated a host of public officials, including it should be said some of Marcos' family members and associates. In fact, late last year the government's finance department estimated that something like 400 billion pesos had been lost to corrupt contracts.

This scandal arrived in the context of some pre-ex