Slowest in five years

To understand what’s happening under Marcos 2.0, I’ve turned to Greek mythology or those ancient stories of gods, heroes and monsters, which the Greeks told themselves in an attempt to understand the world around them.

Perhaps, as in the House of Atreus, a royal family whose problems are passed on from one generation to the next, the House of Marcos may be the country’s modern political version of that Greek tale about a doomed legacy.

Oil shock

There’s the oil crisis for instance, the kind that also hit the Philippines during the time of Marcos Sr. Like a curse, it has made its comeback now under his son’s administration.

Although the shock is due to the Middle East conflict and by no means BBM’s doing, the slow and inadequate response of the government – including the case of a motorcycle taxi driver collapsing to his death on the ayuda line – has made matters worse.

Corruption

But before this ugly crisis unfolded in February, we saw how a massive flood control corruption scandal unfolded last year, revealing a systemic theft of taxpayers’ money meant for flood control projects with lawmakers, government officials and contractors all in cahoots.

In terms of scale and systemic nature, the only thing vastly worse than the flood control mess is the plunder associated with the Marcos Sr. regime.

The Presidential Commission on Good Government has estimated the Marcos-era ill-gotten wealth at up to $10 billion.

For the flood-control projects, Reuters reported that the government had identified irregularities in P545 billion worth of flood-control spending since 2022.

Economic slowdown

This grand looting slowed critical infrastructure spending and pulled down economic growth in the second quarter.

Friday morning brought the jaw-dropping news that the Philippine economy grew at its weakest annual pace since ‌2021 in the second quarter due to a sharp slowdown in construction and domestic demand.

While we all expected the economy to have stagnated, nobody expected it to be this bad.

Even polls and surveys were a bit more optimistic than the actual result.

Growth slowed to 2.3 percent during the quarter, largely due to a slump in construction and softer domestic demand.

This was weaker than the previous quarter’s 2.8 percent expansion.

It brought growth in the first six months of the year to 2.6 percent, well below the bottom of the government’s 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent full-year target.

Amid the economy’s poor performance, Economic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said there are signs of recovery.

“While the second quarter result calls for decisive actions, recent indicators give us reason for cautious optimism that the economy may already be entering the early stages of recovery,” he said.

The government is counting on infrastructure spending to pick up this quarter with recently approved projects expected to commence construction soon.

The corruption scandal, no doubt, remains the culprit for the economy’s poor performance as it curtailed spending and dented investor sentiment.

Construction contracted 14.8 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, worsening from a 4.3 percent decline in the first quarter and weighing on investment, which shrank by 9.2 percent, to mark a fourth straight quarter of contraction, according to Reuters.

Compounding the problem is tighter spending as Filipinos are choosing to spend only on basic necessities – food, transport, electricity and water.

As such, growth in household spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity, softened further to 2.8 percent in the second quarter from three percent in the first quarter as elevated inflation eroded purchasing power.

Inflation, as all of us are experiencing now, remains elevated even though it eased to 6.2 percent in July.

This brought average inflation at five percent over the first seven months of 2026, way above the government’s three percent target.

The negative effect of the Middle East war has worsened the situation.

So yes, here we are again under a Marcos administration facing an oil crisis, massive corruption and economic growth that is the slowest in five years.

It’s the reason his ratings continue to tumble – five percentage points from 54 percent in March to 49 percent in July – and if whispers in the grapevine are true, more and more businessmen are getting frustrated over the administration’s lack of focus.

A year after his “Mahiya naman kayo” SONA, nothing much has been discussed about resolving the flood control mess.

Sure, charges have been filed, and some big fish are in jail but the alleged bigger culprits and mastermind or masterminds are not even facing charges. They are scot-free, enjoying their time in the posh clubs they belong to or meeting with their lawyers and spin doctors over lavish dinners, perhaps brewing new deals or hatching new rackets.

The reason the law has not caught up with them, some say, is that they’re too close to the House of Marcos. Or maybe part of it.

President Marcos has only two years left to do something about our increasingly worsening problems and if we’re lucky enough, maybe leave some inspiring legacy for this nation of 115 million.

But at the rate things are turning out, it doesn’t look like President Marcos is serious in vindicating the Marcos name.

Or maybe, just like in a Greek tragedy, vindication just isn’t possible.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on X @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.