President Arroyo met yesterday morning at Malacañang with the PSE and PDS officials and with her economic managers who reached a "consensus" to conduct business as usual in both the stock market and foreign exchange market despite the collapse of the World Trade Center due to attacks by still unknown terrorists Tuesday morning in the US.
Briefing reporters after the meeting at the Palace yesterday, Presidential Spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao disclosed President Arroyo summoned PSE chairman Felipe Yap and her economic managers to discuss the possible economic impact of the suspension of financial trading at the Wall St. at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) following the attack at the World Trade Center.
Tiglao said the World Trade Center in New York is the headquarters of some of the big fund managers.
"The initial problem is a lot of the clearing is at the World Trade Center but we have been assured by American banks they could set up separate facility that could be open either today or tomorrow," Tiglao disclosed.
"We think that we are preparing for the fallout of the world financial center in New York being hit and closed down for several days but we feel we still have a resilient economy and we can go through this crisis," he stressed.
Tiglao noted that Malaysia and Taiwan followed suit in suspending temporarily trading of their stock markets.
"Initially, there were a lot of fears that economic impact would be every adverse. But so far the decision was undertaken that stock market to remain open even as Malaysia and Taiwan have closed down their stock markets," Tiglao said.
"The President also decided not to stop the foreign exchange trading. So far, it seems not too bad," Tiglao added.
The stock market has fallen down by only three percent while other stock markets have fallen by six to eight percent, Tiglao noted.
"The peso seems to be relatively unaffected at the moment," he said.
Tiglao expressed the hope of the Philippine government that the forced closure of the NYSE amid the slowdown of the American economy would not worsen its global impact to other economies like the Philippines to be hit by recession.
"One good thing is that the resolve of the US to deal with terrorism to be there definitely. So far, the immediate impact of the closing of the New York financial center hasn’t that been bad," Tiglao said.
"But for our part, we think our focus on agricultural modernization on the local economy will still make us resilient even in the face of global recession," he pointed out.
Tiglao admitted the most senior economic adviser present who was able to attend the meeting yesterday with President Arroyo was only Energy Secretary Vicente Perez Jr. because most of them were out of the country on official mission abroad.