Inside Jobo’s wallet

Did you know 1: Susan Roces has set up a company that puts to good use what she learned while taking care of Benpres Holdings chairman Eugenio Lopez II the last months before his death at their Alabang home.

The hospice service targets the families of the terminally ill who have decided to take their loved ones out of the hospital so they can die peacefully in their own beds.

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Did you know 2: There’s talk this year’s official development assistance disbursement will be the lowest in the country’s economic history. The money is there but we need to raise the counterpart funding to get it released.

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Did you know 3: Commission on Audit chairman Guillermo Carague is againts pre-audits specified in the CoA charter.

Here’s the reasoning of Gem Carague, who has served at one time or another as Budget Secretary and as member of the Monetary Board: Any anomaly will be discovered anyway during the post-audits or after the project is completed.

Then again, a pre-audit would have minimized any hanky-panky before government money is even spent.

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Bank notes: It’s still a go for former International Monetary Fund managing director Michel Camdessus, who will give the third memorial lecture sponsored by the Jose B. Fernandez Jr. Center for Banking and Finance next week. (Each ticket is worth P2,000. There’s a P200 discount for AIM alumni).

The lecture coincides with the celebration of the 80th birth year of the late Central Bank Governor Jobo Fernandez and the 35th anniversary of the Asian Institute of Management.

Mr. Camdessus, who is now honorary chairman of the Bank of France, was already with the IMF when Mr. Fernandez quit his job as chief executive officer of Far East Bank and Trust Co. to join government in the mid-1980s.

That was a difficult time for the country’s economy. Mr. Fernandez carried in his wallet an Argentina paper bill to remind him of what he must never allow to happen to the Philippine peso – a worthless currency.

It was no exaggeration that Argentinians then would rush to the supermarkets immediately after getting their salaries because the value of their money would have significantly depreciated from the time they left their offices to the time they handed over their salaries to their wives waiting outside the supermarket.

Going back to Mr. Camdessus, the Frenchman is certainly as brave as the European team which has completed the accrediting process for the quality of education and facilities of AIM (Imagine an ISO accreditation process for schools). The US team – being accredited by the European and the Americans in the same year would have been a first in Asia – backed out for the time being.

Mr. Camdessus’ lecture will be followed a couple of days later, by another lecture, also at the AIM. This time, the man doing the talking is Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stigler.