Stagflation Part 18: Philippine Banks as Shock Absorber — Record Lending, Record Bonds, Record Hiding Places

  

But the boom cannot continue indefinitely. There are two alternatives. Either the banks continue the credit expansion without restriction and thus cause constantly mounting price increases and an ever-growing orgy of speculation, which, as in all other cases of unlimited inflation, ends in a “crack-up boom” and in a collapse of the money and credit system. Or the banks stop before this point is reached, voluntarily renounce further credit expansion and thus bring about the crisis. The depression follows in both instances—Ludwig von Mises 

In this issue: 

Stagflation Part 18: Philippine Banks as Shock Absorber — Record Lending, Record Bonds, Record Hiding Places

I. Introduction: Three Shocks, One Balance Sheet

II. The Seen: Record Bank Lending, Bailout Edition

III. The Unseen: Financial Wile E. Coyote Keeps Running

IV. Who Funds the Sovereign? Borrowed Money, Held to Maturity

V. The Wall: Corporate Maturities Join the Queue

VI. Whac-a-Mole: Every Fix Has a Forwarding Address

VII. The Bank–Sovereign Doom Loop: Who Rescues the Rescuers?

VIII. Conclusion: When the Coyote Looks Down 

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Stagflation Part 18: Philippine Banks as Shock Absorber — Record Lending, Record Bonds, Record Hiding Places 

How policy relief, sovereign borrowing, and hidden balance-sheet losses turn banks into shock absorbers—and shift the cost of each rescue to the next balance sheet. 

I. Introduction: Three Shocks, One Balance Sheet 

Every shock since 2020 has had the same first responder: the banking system. Every bailout has had the same last bearer: the banking system. In between sits the sovereign, whose paper the banks keep buying. 

Underneath runs the same operating framework: free-lunch politics rewards spending now and sends the bill later. Spending outruns real savings; the gap is financed through domestic and external credit, central-bank accommodation, and the printing press. Monetary aggregates duly celebrate. The underlying scarcity of real resources, meanwhile, receives no such memo. 

Following the Keynesian dogma that spending drives GDP, the political class gets its preferred scorecard: expenditure goes up, and measured output may follow. 

But debt-financed spending is not synonymous with sustainable production. Borrowing can pull expenditure forward; it cannot, by itself, manufacture the real savings and complementary capital needed to sustain production. GDP records the expenditure. The liabilities remain on the balance sheet. 

Emergencies amplify this dynamic. 

A banking system cannot manufacture real savings simply by creating money. It can create deposits and extend credit, generating claims on future income. Those claims then accumulate across the economy, and the banks become warehouses for a growing web of financial promises. 

The magnification began with the pandemic rescue: historic BSP injections of Php 2.3 trillion, an unprecedented combination of interest-rate and reserve-requirement ratio (RRR) cuts, regulatory relief, fiscal deficits, and a USD/PHP regime operating under an implicit Php 59 (soft peg) ceiling. 

The 2022 oil shock arrived on top of that liquidity. 

Now comes the second oil shock of 2026, catalyzed by the Iran/Middle East conflict, but into an economy carrying a very different set of vulnerabilities: record public debt, eight months of twin deficits, weaker GDP growth, a return to 7.2% inflation, sharply lower gross international reserves (GIR), and a bond market beginning to reprice sovereign risk. 

The rescue capacity that absorbed the earlier shocks has itself become part of the balance sheet. 

This is the operating environment behind EO 110, BSP relief, and the current foreign-exchange regime. The Php 61.75 soft ceiling has given way to a wider operating range of Php 62.465–Php 62.86, before the peso breached Php 63. 

In summary:

• The first rescue created the liquidity.
• The second shock tested it.
• The third arrives after the balance sheets have accumulated the consequences.

The bill now travels through a system whose capacity to absorb it can no longer be taken for granted. And the banks remain central to that transmission. 

Consider EO 110. When a price is held below the level required to clear a market under prevailing conditions, the gap does not vanish. Someone must absorb it. The power producer or transport operator may initially bear the shortfall; bank credit can finance the resulting cash-flow gap; subsidies or other government support may shift part of the burden to the sovereign. Depending on the contractual and institutional arrangements, losses can migrate from one balance sheet to another. 

That is balance-sheet transfer. Bank credit is one of its shadows in the ledger. 

This week's market tape put a price on the accumulated pressures.

Figure 1

In a follow-up to our latest outlook, Whac-a-Mole Economics: The Week the Philippine Financial Markets Cracked, the USD/PHP printed its 27th record low of the year, breaking through 63 to close at 63.06 on October 15, before ending the week slightly lower at 62.985—still a record on a weekly basis. 

The 10-year BVAL yield, after reaching 8.1115% on October 8, eased to 8.0184% at the week's close. That reprieve did little to erase the broader repricing: the yield remained above the May 2026 and November 2022 highs cited in our market comparison. The 20- and 25-year yields closed at multiyear highs of 8.3856% and 8.3846%, respectively. (Figure 1, topmost pane) 

Equities offered a different surface impression. The PSEi skidded toward 5,600, hit by ICTSI's 6.89% plunge on October 14. But gains concentrated in the top 5 heavyweight stocks, led by ICT during the final two sessions, subsequently lifted the index by 1.43% for the week, recovering earlier losses. 

For a short follow-up to last week's article, see this week's account of the splenetic Philippine markets in my Substack note, Another Whac-a-Mole Week: Three Markets, One Signal—Escalating Financial Stress. 

Still, the peso, bonds, and PSEi remain under stress. Three markets, one signal. 

They were not merely reacting to three separate stories. They were repricing claims and risks across three interconnected balance-sheet domains: the government's, the banks', and the conglomerates'. 

• The peso prices the external constraint.
• Equities price claims on private businesses.
• Sovereign yields price the terms on which the government can finance itself—and provide a benchmark that feeds into financing conditions across the economy.
• The banks sit in the middle, holding claims on the other two while depending on their own funding conditions, asset valuations, and borrowers' capacity to pay. 

This installment reads the middle balance sheet. We turn to the August banking data to examine how the transfer manifests itself in lending, asset allocation, and the accumulation of financial claims. 

II. The Seen: Record Bank Lending, Bailout Edition 

The news headline writes itself: total loan portfolio (TLP) hit a record Php 17.783 trillion in August, up 13.21% year-on-year. Production loans accelerated for a third consecutive month, reaching 10.57%. 

Now look at who borrowed more. (Figure 1, middle image) 

• Electricity, gas, and steam: +27.03% YoY, accelerating from 24.36% in July. Share of the loan book: 14.1%.
• Administrative and support services: +20.91%, up from 15.14% in July.
• Financials: +9.04%, up from 5.36%.
• Mining: +54.54%, up from 51.4%.
• Trade: +10.52%, up from 8.76%. 

And those whose borrowing growth slowed: 

• Manufacturing: +6.07%, decelerating from 7.2%—ironically, amid a chip-export boom.
• Real estate: +4.52%, down from 5.55%.
• Consumer loans: +16.19%, down from 17.07%. Credit-card growth was 23.34%, slowing for the fifth consecutive month; auto loans grew 5.83% from 6.97% in July. 

The headline is record lending. The more revealing story is its composition. 

The surge is concentrated in sectors where intervention, regulatory arrangements, or financing pressures has been shaping capital allocation. 

Start with electricity. 

The SMC-AEV-MER and Prime Infra-FGEN consolidations, the suspension of real-property taxes (RPT), the GEA-ALL transition layered on top of FIT-ALL, and an ERC that returns what it takes in one ruling and recovers it in the next. For instance, it orders Meralco to refund consumers in one ruling while approving increases in generation charges in another 

These forms part of the institutional landscape we've examined in previous installments in 2025 (see references below). 

The contradiction is hard to miss: regulate prices, redistribute costs, alter the terms of recovery, and then observe the financing demands generated by the resulting structure. 

The 27.03% lending growth’s mechanism is the Averch-Johnson effect: When allowable returns are tied to a regulated capital base, firms can have an incentive to expand that base beyond what an unregulated profit-maximizing firm would choose. 

The bank finances the enlargement. The regulator helps determine the returns. 

Bluntly, the Averch-Johnson effect needs no ideology:  the regulator's formula pays you to borrow. 

Now consider financials. 

Financial-sector lending accelerated from 5.36% to 9.04%. Essentially, financials are the BSP relief regime finding its own counterparty. The system lends to the system, providing liquidity and bridge financing within the very structure the interventions are intended to stabilize. Credit circulates; the question is how much new productive activity it creates and how much of the existing financial structure it keeps afloat. 

Then comes trade. 

Trade is where the money illusion becomes relevant. Retailers see nominal sales growth against Q2 inflation of 6.5%, interpret the plus signs as stronger demand, and borrow to replenish inventories. But nominal turnover is not real volume, and rising sales values do not necessarily mean consumers are buying more goods. 

The goods arrive. The inventory has to move. 

Yet consumer-credit growth is decelerating. Household purchasing power is under pressure. If inventories were accumulated on the assumption that nominal sales growth represented stronger real demand, retailers could find themselves financing goods that turn over more slowly than expected. 

That is how a credit expansion becomes an inventory problem, then a cash-flow problem, and eventually a delinquency problem. It is a causal sequence to test, not an automatic consequence of the lending figures. 

The employment data add another contradiction. 

Trade employment increased by 227,000 in August even as trade lending growth reached 10.52%. Construction employment rose by 389,500, while construction lending contracted 11.73% year-on-year. (Figure 1, lowest graph) 

Employment, credit, and output need not move together in the short run. But when lending expands rapidly without a corresponding improvement in real activity—or contracts while employment rises—we need to look beneath the headline indicators to understand what is financing production, what is sustaining existing operations, and where adjustment may be accumulating. 

Record lending is not record value-added. 

Our Part 14 already documented the broader disconnect: Q2 GDP growth of 2.3%, first-half growth of 2.6%, a 13.9% contraction in construction, and a 9.2% decline in gross capital formation. Universal and commercial (U/KB) bank credit grew 10.3% against an economy expanding at roughly 2%. 

The difference was not productive expansion. Credit was financing refinancing, liquidity support, and the cost of keeping an intervention-distorted structure viable. 

Credit expanding while investment contracts is not a boom. It is a financial system extending claims while the real economy's capacity to generate returns deteriorates. The lending figures celebrate expansion; the underlying economic signals reveal its failure to translate into productive growth. 

III. The Unseen: Financial Wile E. Coyote Keeps Running 

Chased by the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and hangs in midair. Everything appears fine until he looks down and realizes there is no ground beneath him. 

The gross NPL ratio is that coyote. 

Figure 2 

It is a fraction: nonperforming loans over total loans. While the denominator sprints, the ratio can remain perfectly composed, even as the numerator climbs. The trick is not that bad loans disappear. It is that the loan book grows faster than they do. 

August's gross NPL ratio held at 3.35%, unchanged from July. Look beneath the calm. 

Gross NPLs reached Php 596 billion, up 8.4% year-on-year and the second-highest level on record, just below May's Php 601 billion. Meanwhile, the total loan portfolio hit a record Php 17.783 trillion, expanding 13.21%—all under relief measures. (Figure 2, topmost window) 

The denominator is running faster than the numerator. 

Then the other financial coyotes. 

• Allowances for credit losses reached a record Php 555 billion, up 6.99% year-on-year and equivalent to 3.12% of loans—roughly 93% of gross NPLs. 
• Distressed assets climbed to Php 1.008 trillion, up 10.66%. (Figure 2, middle diagram) 

The reported NPL ratio looks stable because the loan book is expanding faster than the stock of recognized bad loans. That is the arithmetic. It is not evidence that underlying credit quality is improving. 

The ratio does not tell us how quickly the system is accumulating risk. It tells us how much recognized bad debt sits inside an expanding pool of loans. When the pool grows fast enough, the ratio can hold steady while the underlying burden rises. 

The coyote keeps running. The ground has not returned. 

Now go one level down, where the aggregate cannot hide the pattern. 

The consumer is already slowing 

In Q2 2026 consumer lending, loan growth decelerated across every category, while NPL growth outran loan growth in nearly all of them: (Figure 2, lowest chart) 

• Consumer loans: lending grew 14.42%, against NPL growth of 19.64%.
• Motor vehicle loans: lending grew 6.2%, while NPLs surged 16.6%. Vehicle sales slid by about 11.4% in August YTD; risibly, the weather is the alibi.
• Credit-card receivables: lending grew 25.28%, but NPLs jumped 46.53%—nearly twice as fast.
• Salary loans: NPLs grew 24.56%, even after the maturity extension under Circular 1239. 

The pattern is straightforward: recognized distress is growing faster than the underlying credit categories in which it is accumulating. Credit-card NPLs are expanding at nearly twice the pace of receivables. Motor-vehicle NPLs are rising while sales contract. Salary-loan distress continues despite extended repayment periods. 

Extending maturities can ease immediate payment pressure. It can also push the recognition of distress further down the road. The calendar changes; the obligation does not vanish. 

Real estate: the conspicuous exception 

Real-estate NPLs rose by only 2.74%, despite the known vacancy overhang. 

That is the outlier. While consumer-credit deterioration shows up clearly in the numbers, real-estate distress appears far more contained. Sustained refinancing, relief-enabled reporting, inaccurate data and delayed recognition offer possible explanations. The available figures do not establish which mechanism dominates. 

But the contrast is worth watching. A subdued NPL figure is not the same thing as a healthy underlying asset market, particularly when vacancies and refinancing needs remain part of the picture. 

The sectoral bailout 

Now return to the system-wide ratio. 

The aggregate remains stable while consumer-credit quality deteriorates and lending expands rapidly in electricity, financials, and administrative and support services. These are precisely the sectors in which regulatory arrangements, policy relief, and institutional financing needs shape the demand for credit. 

The point being: asset quality is being held up by the bailout sectors. 

The composition of lending matters because rapid expansion in one part of the loan book can dilute the reported deterioration elsewhere. Remove the denominator growth contributed by the expanding sectors, and that cushioning effect weakens—or the rot gets exposed. 

The aggregate ratio conceals the divergence: consumer distress is accelerating, while policy-sensitive sectors continue to expand the pool of outstanding credit. 

This is why record lending and a stable NPL ratio can coexist with deteriorating underlying economic conditions. The banking system can continue extending claims even as the capacity of households and businesses to service those claims comes under pressure. 

When the measurement rules move 

And the measurement institutions have been moved. 

NPL grace periods under Monetary Board Resolution 296, intragroup credit reforms, the release of previously required capital buffers (BSP Circular No. 1235, Series of 2026), and mark-to-market relief (BSP Memorandum No. 2026-027) alter the terms under which financial stress is recognized, absorbed, or reported. 

A reclassified loan is not a repaid loan. It is a loan given more time before it is called what it is. 

A maturity extension can postpone a missed payment. A reporting accommodation can change when a loan is classified as distressed. A capital-buffer release can create additional room to absorb losses. A mark-to-market waiver can defer the recognition of valuation changes. 

These measures are not identical, but they share a consequence: they can buy time between the emergence of financial pressure and its full recognition in reported indicators. 

And time changes incentives. 

When institutions are under pressure to preserve capital, maintain reported solvency, and avoid recognizing losses, the temptation to postpone bad news grows. Relief can provide breathing room for a genuine recovery. It can also prolong the appearance of stability when the underlying problem remains unresolved. 

Charles Kindleberger understood the darker side of financial distress. In Manias, Panics, and Crashes, he describes the sauve qui peut mentality—the scramble for individual survival that takes hold during crashes and panics. As institutions and individuals attempt to escape mounting losses, swindling, fraud, embezzlement, and other forms of misconduct can become part of the unraveling. 

The connection is institutional, not merely moral. When losses threaten survival and the incentives favor preserving appearances, desperation can turn deferred recognition into deliberate concealment. 

First, the numbers are softened. Then the incentives deteriorate. Eventually, someone has to absorb the loss. 

The coyote keeps running because the denominator is still growing, relief is still buying time, and the accounting has not yet forced the adjustment into view. 

But the balance sheet is accumulating the bill. 

A stable ratio is not a stable system. It may simply be a system that has not yet looked down. 

IV. Who Funds the Sovereign? Borrowed Money, Held to Maturity 

The loan book is half the balance sheet. The other half is paper. Yet another Coyote.

Figure 3 

• Net claims on the central government (NCoCG): Php 6.345 trillion, +16.6% YoY, a seventh consecutive month of double-digit growth, equivalent to roughly a fifth of bank assets. 
• Debt securities at amortized cost, formerly held-to-maturity (HTM): Php 4.493 trillion, +11.5%, a record. Growth accelerated from 3.17% in March to 11.5% in August. (Figure 3, topmost image) 
• Available-for-sale (AFS) securities: growth of 14.19%, with accumulated losses of Php 145.65 billion, the third-highest on record. 

AFS shows the losses recognized in the books. HTM is an accounting choice: hold the bond to maturity, and market-price fluctuations generally do not flow through its carrying value. The price still exists; it simply does not appear in the accounts in the same way. Add a mark-to-market waiver, and more of the sovereign's repricing stays outside reported valuations. 

When a bank's loan portfolio grows 13% while deposits rise 9.44%, the funding gap has to come from somewhere. It came increasingly from borrowing: 

• Bills and bonds payable: Php 2.312 trillion, the second-highest level, +51.84%.
• Interbank loans: Php 484 billion, +20.44%.
• Repos: Php 648 billion, +54.55%, following June's record Php 983 billion. (Figure 3, middle and lowest charts) 

Borrow short, hold long, hope the rollover keeps rolling. 

That is transitional Ponzi finance in the Minskyan sense: a position increasingly dependent on continued refinancing. Here, the position is the sovereign's own paper.

Figure 4

The cushion is thinning from the other side. Cash to deposits fell to 9.24%, tying its all-time low; liquid assets to deposits stood at 47.64%, trending downward. (Figure 4, upper window) 

But what counts as liquid? A substantial share is government paper that may have to be sold into the same market, during the same squeeze, as other holders seek liquidity. A liquid asset is one you can sell without taking a damaging loss—not merely one for which a market exists. PDS data already show the strain: September trading volume was the lowest of 2026 as yields rose. 

The fourth balance sheet: captive savings 

The Commission on Audit recently flagged Php 40 billion in SSS equity-paper losses. That is what is seen. 

Beneath the other three balance sheets sits one whose contributors cannot simply leave. SSS coverage is compulsory, the state shapes the institutional framework, and members have no direct say over individual investment decisions. Contributions reached Php 373.6 billion in 2025, up 14.8%. (Figure 4, lower SSS table)

About Php 572 billion—46% of its Php 1.254 trillion in assets—is invested in government paper. Another parallel with the banks: Php 531.8 billion in bonds, more than 80% of non-current financial assets and up 45% in 2025, sits at amortized cost. The books record carrying value, not what those bonds would fetch in the market today. 

When yields rise, bond prices fall. The carrying value need not follow. Temporary is a forecast, not an accounting category. 

The sovereign is also the borrower, so rising yields pressure government financing and the market value of SSS's bond holdings simultaneously: correlation, not diversification. 

Foreign money can exit, and the peso reflects part of that repricing. Captive savings cannot exit as freely; the consequences emerge through investment returns, fund sustainability, and the capacity to meet future pension obligations. 

The channel into stagflation runs through the paycheck. The compulsory contribution rate rose to 15% as September 2026 CPI reached 7.2%, including 9.0% for the bottom 30%. 

Take-home pay is squeezed to fund a pool that finances the sovereign. Pension disbursements rose 12.3% to Php 237.7 billion; retiree pensions are scheduled to rise 10% annually through 2027, while contribution rates remain frozen. 

In 2025, contributions exceeded benefit payments by Php 68 billion in cash. But that is an ex-post result, not proof of long-term sustainability. There was no forced selling in 2025. 

The trigger is net cash outflow that forces the sale of cost-carried bonds below carrying value. The investment portfolio carries market risk; cash flows carry demographic and economic risk. They can deteriorate together. 

The money supply: credit finds another route

Figure 5

Meanwhile, M3 grew 11.2% in August, its seventh consecutive month of double-digit growth. Deposit substitutes surged 75.9% YoY and have remained above 50% growth since March. M1 & M2 growth also accelerated from 7.4% and 9% in July to 8.6% and 9.8% in August. (Figure 5, upper diagram) 

The banks are funding the state partly by issuing their own paper. The sovereign borrows; banks acquire the claims; financial institutions expand their funding. Credit expansion feeds the sovereign-financing loop. 

This is where the Cantillon effect enters. New money does not reach everyone simultaneously. The first recipients—the sovereign and the sectors receiving the initial financing—gain purchasing power before the resulting price adjustments spread through the economy. Those further down the chain encounter the adjustment after relative prices have already moved. It is no coincidence that the oil-shock CPI surge (third wave of the cycle) has been accompanied by pandemic-era money-supply growth. September CPI hit 7.2%—returning to April 2026 high. (Figure 5, lower image) 

The sovereign gets its financing. Banks accumulate the claims. Captive savers supply funds they cannot freely redirect. Households absorb the pressure through reduced purchasing power and compulsory contributions. 

The same system that finances the sovereign transmits the cost of financing it. 

V. The Wall: Corporate Maturities Join the Queue 

The BSP has already identified the next claimant. Its Financial Stability Report (2025) p.30, warns of a sizeable maturity wall among large conglomerates: approximately Php 1.6 trillion, or 22.7% of conglomerate debt, falls due between 2027 and 2029 . US-dollar debt averages 37.6% of conglomerate debt over the next five years. Refinancing has so far relied on bonds, bank funding, and internal liquidity. The BSP's prescription: “close monitoring.” 

That warning predates the second oil shock. Since then, the peso has broken through its previous soft ceiling, reserves have fallen to a three-year low, and the 10-year BVAL yield has climbed above 8%. The wall did not move. The ground in front of it did. 

The stock market repriced the risk first. On October 15, the PSEi fell 2.2%, with index heavyweights doing the damage. Equity markets price conglomerate balance sheets daily; the maturity schedule brings the reckoning more slowly, then all at once. 

Refinancing is not repayment. It is a fresh claim on loanable funds. Banks can create nominal credit; they cannot manufacture the real savings, labor, materials, and capital goods needed to sustain every project that credit finances or it cannot mint the real savings behind it. 

The arithmetic puts the wall in perspective. The BSP's figures imply roughly Php 7 trillion in conglomerate debt. The Php 1.6 trillion due over 2027–2029 equals about 9% of today's bank loan book. Spread evenly across three years, it amounts to approximately Php 533 billion annually—about a quarter of last year's Php 2.08 trillion increase in bank loans. 

And conglomerates are not refinancing in a vacuum. 

The sovereign is borrowing, with banks' net claims on government at Php 6.345 trillion, up 16.6%, as the 10-year BVAL yield exceeds 8%. 

Utilities and other policy-supported sectors are absorbing credit: electricity lending grew 27%, while financial and administrative lending accelerated. 

Banks themselves are increasingly reliant on bills and bonds payable, interbank loans, and repos. 

Now the conglomerates arrive at the refinancing window with Php 1.6 trillion in maturities due over 2027–2029, 37.6% of their debt in dollars. 

Meanwhile, consumers face slowing loan growth, and MSMEs are already being squeezed out, as discussed in our Magna Carta installment. 

Everyone wants the same pool of savings and liquidity. Not everyone gets access on equal terms. 

Four stagflation channels follow. 

1. Crowding out. Funds are rationed by access, not by productivity. Those with sovereign standing or a conglomerate crest get financed; others face higher rates or a rejected application. Credit that rolls over old projects does not build new capacity. That is how credit can grow 13% while gross capital formation contracts 9.2%. Rolled-over debt keeps yesterday's projects from liquidating. That is not capital allocation. It is capital preservation for the already-allocated. 

2. Gearing. Roll over at 8% what was borrowed at lower coupons, and the interest burden rises even if the principal does not. Rolling over is not deleveraging; it is gearing with extra steps. These groups are simultaneously borrowers, bond issuers and, in many cases, owners of the banks that lend to them. Their exposures are not independent bets. They are tied to the same policy regime and financing conditions. 

3. Dollars. With 37.6% of conglomerate debt denominated in dollars, the maturity wall competes for foreign currency with sovereign external debt service and the oil import bill. All three draw on a reserve stock that has just fallen by $4.85 billion. A wider peso trading range does not create dollars. It reprices their scarcity. 

4. Money. If real savings cannot meet the queue, adjustment must come through some combination of higher rates, asset sales, defaults, project cancellations, or credit rationing. 

But if the political system refuses to accept that adjustment, monetary accommodation becomes the escape route. Section IV has already shown the direction: seven consecutive months of double-digit M3 growth, alongside CPI inflation of 7.2%. When financing sustains claims without expanding productive capacity, the economy gets more nominal demand competing for constrained real resources. That is how the same process can feed both sides of stagflation. 

The BSP calls it a wall. Walls are what you hit when you keep driving. The 2027 maturities begin in a few months. The 2026 data already show the system's preferred response: relief, rollover, and more of the same paper. 

VI. Whac-a-Mole: Every Fix Has a Forwarding Address 

The September–October data are not a new story. They are the old story at new addresses. 

Years of spending ahead of real savings (or the record savings-investment gap) created the underlying imbalances; emergency interventions postponed adjustment by drawing down reserves, bank capital, and fiscal room. The oil shock was the trigger, not the cause. Each fix suppresses pressure in one place, only for it to surface in the next least-controlled price.

Figure 6 

The pressure surfaces in goods, dollars, and yields because the underlying constraint is real savings. What Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk called the subsistence fund or real savings is the stock of goods and resources that sustains workers and projects until production yields output. Credit can create competing claims on that fund; it cannot conjure the real resources themselves. When claims outrun available resources, the adjustment surfaces in prices: consumer goods, foreign exchange, and the price of time—interest rates. 

In each case, the fix moved the problem; none removed it. The hammer shrinks with every swing: defending the peso spent reserves, the peso broke anyway, and the bond market is the next mole. A currency can be managed. A yield curve can only be managed so far. (Figure/Table 6) 

Figure 7

The rate channel shows the same blockage. The BSP cut its policy rate nine times, by a cumulative 225 basis points, from August 2024. Average bank lending rates peaked at 8.234% that month and bottomed at 7.125% in February 2026—a decline of just 110.9 bps, less than half the policy-rate reduction. By July, lending rates had climbed back to 7.883%, up 75.8 bps from the low. (Figure 7, upper graph) 

Banks price loans according to their own funding costs and risk, not simply the BSP's policy corridor. Both are being reshaped by the imbalances already discussed: wholesale funding costs are rising, with bills and bonds payable up 51.8% and repos up 54.6% (August 2026); sovereign yields near 8% raise the opportunity cost of private lending; and deteriorating asset quality requires provisions against potential losses. 

The policy rate is a nudge. The balance sheet is the answer. 

Interest is supposed to coordinate saving and investment. Here, there are two prices: the BSP's policy rate and the rate banks actually charge. The first can be cut by decree. The second must contend with funding costs, credit risk, and the government's demand for financing. 

A supply shock makes the contradiction worse. Higher rates cannot produce more rice or oil. They work through credit conditions instead, tightening financing for consumers and MSMEs while policy-supported borrowers continue to absorb credit. 

That is the asymmetry: the sectors bearing the shock face tighter constraints, while the sectors sustained by intervention retain access to financing. 

Whac-a-mole economics is the diagnosis. The bank is the mallet's table. Each strike lands on the same surface. 

VII. The Bank–Sovereign Doom Loop: Who Rescues the Rescuers? 

Name the loop plainly:

1. The sovereign runs deficits larger than revenue—Php 1.054 trillion in eight months—and needs banks to absorb its paper.
2. Banks hold that paper, fund it short, and park much of it at amortized cost. Regulatory relief can obscure market losses without eliminating them.
3. Rising yields, driven by the oil shock, peso weakness, and global bond repricing, reduce the market value of those holdings. Accounting rules determine how much of the loss is reported, not whether it occurred.
4. Capital relief and forbearance soften the immediate consequences, prolonging the system's dependence on sovereign paper.
5. The sovereign is a major asset of the banking system and cannot reprice without transmitting losses back to its creditors. The BSP is pulled toward the familiar response: suppress, subsidize, transfer, borrow.
6. A weaker peso raises the peso value of external debt—about Php 90 billion in August alone (Part 17)—widening the next deficit and returning the process to step one.

The sovereign and the banks are one balance sheet in two names. The crisis is not simply that either is weak. It is that each can be rescued only at the risk of weakening the other. 

Who rescues the rescuer? 

The last time developing-world sovereigns and their banks hit this wall, the Baker and Brady Plans offered successive responses. The Baker Plan (1985) sought to sustain debtors through structural adjustment, multilateral support, and fresh commercial-bank lending. It failed to resolve the debt overhang. The Brady Plan (1989) shifted toward debt reduction, exchanging commercial bank loans for bonds, some backed by US Treasury collateral, with IMF and World Bank support. The mechanism changed from extending credit to restructuring claims. 

Both approaches depended on coordinated creditors and access to external financing. 

This time the donors have their own queue: record public debt in the advanced economies, Fed hike bets after hot US inflation, and an AI financing trade that imploded this week (Nasdaq −4.5%, the worst week since June; the Semiconductor (SOX) index −11.4%; more than $1T off the top 20 AI and chip names). South Korea’s KOSPI plunged 14.5% this week and 18.3% over seven sessions, leaving it nearly 40% below its June 19 high. Samsung fell 17.7% this week and 43% from its June high, while SK Hynix dropped 24.3% and 57%, respectively. Japan’s Nikkei bushwhacked, plunging 5.4% (Figure 7, lowest chart) 

Bond vigilantes, investors who sell a government's bonds when they distrust its finances, are already repricing here and abroad. 

This matters to the Philippines. The same global repricing that threatens AI financing also competes with sovereign borrowing and corporate refinancing for investor capital. A sustained unwind would tighten credit, weaken collateral, and compete with sovereigns and conglomerates for a shrinking pool of risk-bearing capital. The Philippines' refinancing problem is therefore arriving as the capacity of external markets to absorb risk is itself under pressure. 

The central bank faces two broad paths: let yields, the peso, and asset valuations adjust, forcing losses into the open; or extend liquidity and relief, postponing recognition while deepening dependence on continued accommodation. The first is politically painful. The second feeds the loop. 

The system rewards the second until it breaks. 

One reserve stock, three claimants: the currency, the banks, and the sovereign. 

The textbook version is the Mundell–Fleming trilemma or the Impossible Trinity: a country cannot simultaneously maintain a managed exchange rate, free capital flows, and independent monetary policy. Something has to give. The BSP has sought to manage the peso while domestic monetary conditions lag behind inflation. The exchange rate has absorbed much of the resulting pressure. 

The structural problem is the deepening fiscal dominance. 

When the deficit path remains fixed, the central bank becomes the residual financier. Tight money today can simply mean more money creation tomorrow—the unpleasant monetarist arithmetic of Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace. Their 1981 analysis explains how persistent fiscal financing needs can ultimately constrain monetary policy and shift the burden into future monetary expansion. 

That closes the loop. Deficits create the need for financing; banks absorb the sovereign's paper; repricing threatens bank balance sheets; relief postpones recognition; and monetary accommodation sustains the financing structure. The cost returns through the economy then the peso, yields, and prices. 

The AI trade adds an external vulnerability: the very global capital markets expected to absorb more borrowing are reassessing the returns on one of their largest investment booms. 

The sovereign borrows from the banks, the banks depend on the sovereign, and the central bank is expected to keep both standing. The rescuers are inside the loop—and the outside rescuer is busy putting out fires of its own. 

VIII. Conclusion: When the Coyote Looks Down 

The banking system has become the shock absorber for a political economy that spends beyond its real savings. Credit expands, sovereign paper accumulates, losses are deferred, and liquidity is consumed to keep the structure running. Each intervention transfers the pressure without removing its cause. 

This is the bank–sovereign doom loop: the sovereign depends on banks to finance its deficits; banks depend on the sovereign's paper to sustain their balance sheets; and the BSP is expected to keep both afloat. The same rescue that postpones adjustment deepens the system's dependence on the next rescue. 

The tipping point comes when the chain breaks—when refinancing fails, sovereign repricing forces losses into bank capital, or pressure on the peso exhausts the room for intervention. These are not independent risks. Each can trigger the others. 

The 2027–2029 corporate maturity wall adds another claimant to a financing system already stretched between the sovereign, policy-supported borrowers, and banks' own funding needs. 

The Coyote does not fall because he looks down. He falls when he realizes there is no ground beneath him. Looking down is the recognition; the fall is the adjustment that can no longer be deferred. 

The balance sheets are still running. The ground beneath them is already giving way. 

---

References: 

Stagflation Part 17: Eight Months of Twin Deficits, Record Debt, and the Bill for Deferred Adjustment, October 4, 2026 

Stagflation Part 14: Q2 GDP at 2.3% and Falling — A GDP Built on Suppression and Debt, August 9, 2026 

USD-PHP at Record Highs: The Three Philippine Fault Lines—Energy Fragility, Fiscal Bailouts, Bank Stress, December 21,2025 

The Oligarchic Bailout Everyone Missed: How the Energy Fragility Now Threatens the Philippine Peso and the Economy, December 7, 2025 

Inside the SMC–Meralco–AEV Energy Deal: Asset Transfers That Mask a Systemic Fragility Loop, November 23, 2025

 

 

The MSME Credit Black Hole: Failure of the Magna Carta

 

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced—Aldous Huxley 

In this issue:

The MSME Credit Black Hole: Failure of the Magna Carta

I. The Magna Carta: The Policy and Its Promise

II. The Empirical Test

III. Why MSME Lending Became Relatively Less Attractive

IV. When The State Makes The Intended Borrower Less Bankable

V. Where Did the Bank’s Capacity Go?

VI. Why The Architecture Keeps Reproducing Itself

VII. Where The 2026 BSP Relief Cascade Fits

VIII. Conclusion: Three Symptoms, One Structure

The MSME Credit Black Hole: Failure of the Magna Carta 

How a Credit Quota Failed to Change the Architecture of Financial Concentration 

I. The Magna Carta: The Policy and Its Promise 

Enacted in 1991 through Republic Act 6977, the Magna Carta for Small Enterprises was built around a simple structural diagnosis: banks naturally preferred larger, more established borrowers, leaving smaller businesses chronically short of formal credit. Congress tried to override that bias by mandating that banks devote a share of their lending to small enterprises. 

The framework was strengthened in 1997 and expanded again through RA 9501 in 2008, which established the familiar 8% allocation for micro and small enterprises and 2% for medium enterprises, for a combined 10% mandate, backed by penalties for noncompliance. 

The law is the anchor. Whether it worked is an empirical question. 

The data has been answering it for sixteen years. 

II. The Empirical Test

Figure 1

MSMEs account for roughly 99.6% of businesses and about 67% of employment, yet bank lending to the sector has remained stubbornly below the share Congress intended to force into the system. (Figure 1)

Figure 2

MSME lending's share of the banking system's loan portfolio peaked near 8.4% in Q1 2010. It then fell in an almost uninterrupted decline. It kept falling after the quota expired in 2018 and MSME lending ceased to be subject to a mandatory allocation. (Figure 2) 

By Q2 2026, lending to the MSMEs stood at 4.48% of the banking system's portfolio — the second-lowest share on record for the combined micro-small segment — while the medium-enterprise share was at its lowest recorded level. 

The law was intended to redirect bank credit toward the productive base. 

Instead, the banking system progressively moved away from the mandate. 

That matters because it eliminates the easiest explanation for the failure: enforcement. 

Two different enforcement regimes, spanning four presidential administrations, produced essentially the same underlying trajectory. The quota was mandatory and backed by penalties; then the quota expired and compliance became voluntary. Neither regime reversed the decline. 

That consistency is the tell. 

A law that produces the same disappointing outcome under both a penalty-backed mandate and a voluntary regime is not primarily failing because regulators forgot to enforce it. It is failing because the policy is asking legislation to override an incentive structure that keeps making the targeted lending relatively unattractive. 

There is a Goodhart's Law problem here: once the state turns a desired outcome into a compliance target, the target can become the object of the exercise rather than the underlying objective. The Magna Carta could measure whether banks allocated a prescribed share of their portfolio to MSMEs. It could penalize them when they did not. What it could not do was make MSME lending economically as attractive as the alternatives competing for the same balance sheet. 

It measured the allocation. It never changed the incentives producing the allocation. 

And once the quota became the policy instrument, compliance could substitute for reform. The system could satisfy, evade, minimize or eventually abandon the target without resolving the underlying reason banks preferred other borrowers. 

That is why the sixteen-year trajectory matters more than any individual compliance rate. The quota was aimed at the symptom — the share of credit going to MSMEs — while the incentive structure determining that share remained largely intact. 

The question, then, is not why banks ignored the Magna Carta. 

It is why lending to MSMEs kept becoming a worse proposition. 

III. Why MSME Lending Became Relatively Less Attractive 

The banking system's bias against MSMEs did not happen in a vacuum. The risk-adjusted cost of serving them has been shaped by several forces operating simultaneously, and the direction of travel has been remarkably consistent. 

The first is monetary — and inflation is central to it. 

Sustained periods of easy money expand the nominal pool of money and credit moving through the banking system. But nominal credit growth is not the same thing as an expansion of real productive capacity capable of absorbing higher-risk lending. 

For MSMEs, the more immediate problem is volatility. 

Inflation does not simply raise prices. It makes the relationship between costs, revenues and cash flow less predictable. Input costs can move faster than a small business can adjust prices. Working-capital requirements rise. Real purchasing power falls. Customers become more price-sensitive. Margins that were already thin become harder to forecast. 

Large corporations can absorb some of this through scale, purchasing power, pricing power, diversified revenue streams and easier access to financing. 

The typical MSME cannot. 

A bank does not lend against an entrepreneur's intentions. It lends against the probability that future cash flow will be sufficient to service the debt. When inflation makes that cash flow more volatile, the borrower becomes harder to underwrite even if the business remains viable in the long run. 

So what looks like a growing credit system in peso terms can coexist with a shrinking pool of borrowers whose real cash flows are stable enough to absorb bank debt. 

This is particularly damaging to MSMEs because they are already cash-flow-thin, collateral-poor and less able to hedge against purchasing-power shocks. Inflation therefore does not merely increase their costs. It increases the uncertainty surrounding their ability to repay. 

That uncertainty has a price. 

The second force is the structure of bank pricing itself. 

Large corporations with established balance sheets, collateral, audited accounts and long credit histories can borrow more cheaply than smaller firms. That cheap financing is not merely a passive advantage. It can become a competitive moat: the largest firms can finance expansion, acquire competitors and consolidate market share at a cost of capital that smaller firms cannot match. 

I wrote about one version of this in 2019, when Jollibee's expansion strategy illustrated the Pac-Man financing logic: use financial capacity to swallow competitors and reinforce an already dominant position. 

This is what preferential access to cheap credit looks like when it meets market concentration. 

The third force is regulatory and sits in the banking system's plumbing rather than in any single law or circular. 

Risk-based capital rules and provisioning requirements make the characteristics of the borrower matter to the bank's economics. An opaque, thinly capitalized, informally collateralized and poorly documented small enterprise is a fundamentally different credit exposure from a sovereign security or a large investment-grade corporation with a long financial history. 

A peso lent to a top-tier corporate borrower or placed in sovereign paper does not impose the same capital, monitoring and information costs as a peso lent to an unlisted small enterprise.

That distinction matters enormously when a bank is deciding where to put scarce balance-sheet capacity. 

Then there is the compliance burden. 

AMLC and KYC requirements, licensing, registration, reporting, taxation, labor rules, inspections and the ordinary friction of operating formally all impose fixed or semi-fixed costs. 

For a large corporation, those costs can be distributed across enormous revenues and dedicated administrative departments. For a small business, they consume a much larger share of the resources available to keep the business operating. 

Even wage increases can have asymmetric effects. A higher minimum wage raises labor costs immediately; a small enterprise with thin margins has far less room to absorb that increase than a large corporation with scale, pricing power and easier access to financing. 

None of these regulations individually targets MSMEs. 

That is precisely the point. 

Their combined effect is to make the typical MSME a more expensive and more difficult credit proposition while the alternative available to banks — paying the Magna Carta penalty — remained relatively cheap and predictable. 

Put the channels together and the sixteen-year decline stops looking like simple negligence. It looks increasingly like a rational response to a system in which MSME lending carries higher volatility, higher underwriting costs, higher capital costs and greater uncertainty than lending to the borrowers with the strongest balance sheets. 

IV. When The State Makes The Intended Borrower Less Bankable 

This creates a feedback loop that the Magna Carta itself could not solve. 

But the loop is larger than compliance alone: 

inflation and input-cost volatility → weaker and less predictable cash flow → higher perceived credit risk 

plus 

more compliance costs → higher fixed operating costs → thinner margins → weaker cash flow 

together producing

higher risk and underwriting costs → less attractive MSME borrowers → weaker bank lending → greater dependence on informal or more expensive financing. 

This is the policy contradiction. 

The state mandates banks to lend to MSMEs while simultaneously maintaining conditions that can make those same enterprises more volatile, less liquid and more expensive to underwrite. 

Inflation is particularly important because it can amplify the entire loop. A business operating with thin margins has little room between revenue and costs. When prices, wages, inventory and working-capital requirements become more volatile, that margin becomes harder to defend. A borrower that was marginally bankable in a stable environment can become unbankable when the same business is subjected to repeated cost and cash-flow shocks. 

The bank sees the final balance sheet. 

It does not care that the original policy objective was noble. 

And this is where the Magna Carta's basic design runs into reality. It treats the shortage of MSME credit as if the problem were primarily a bank's willingness to lend. But willingness is downstream of risk, return, capital requirements, transaction costs and the quality and stability of the borrower being presented to the bank. 

This is the old Bastiat problem of the seen and the unseen. 

The quota makes the seen effect obvious: a mandated peso of MSME lending can be counted, reported and celebrated as evidence that the policy is working. What disappears from view is the unseen opportunity cost — what that peso would otherwise have financed, and whether forcing it into a higher-risk borrower actually creates more productive capacity than the alternative use of the bank's balance sheet. 

The same logic sits behind Bastiat's broken-window fallacy. The broken window creates visible spending for the glazier; what remains unseen is what the shopkeeper would have done with the money had he not been forced to replace the glass. 

The Magna Carta creates its own version of the fallacy. 

It counts the credit it forces into MSMEs. It does not count the allocation it displaces.

That does not mean MSME lending is unproductive. It means that mandating an allocation is not the same thing as demonstrating that the allocation is economically efficient. 

Legislation can change the first-order incentive. 

It cannot repeal the balance sheet. 

V. Where Did the Bank’s Capacity Go? 

The failure becomes more interesting when we stop looking only at what banks did not lend to MSMEs and ask what they did with the capacity instead. 

The answer is visible in the structure of the financial system.

Figure 3

Universal and commercial banks held roughly 93% of the Php 31.3 trillion in total bank resources as of May 2026, while banks themselves accounted for about 83% of the Php 37.64 trillion financial-system total. (Figure 3, upper graph) 

The most recent comparable international measure, the World Bank's five-bank asset concentration ratio, put the top five Philippine banks at 67.3% of total banking assets (as of 2021—this should be larger today). (Figure 3, lower chart) 

This is not a decentralized credit market searching for deserving small borrowers. 

It is a highly concentrated financial system deciding where scarce balance-sheet capacity earns the best risk-adjusted return. 

And a substantial portion has gone into government and large corporate balance sheets.

Figure 4 

Banks' claims on the public sector sit near 30% of M2 and M3 and have grown faster than private credit, while large conglomerates — many operating within ownership structures intertwined with the financial system — absorb another substantial share of bank financing. (Figure 4, upper diagram) 

That produces a sovereign-financial feedback loop: 

government borrowing expands → banks absorb more sovereign exposure → financial institutions become more exposed to fiscal conditions → preserving liquidity and refinancing capacity becomes more important → financial stability and sovereign-market functioning become increasingly important to the system itself. 

This is the sovereign doom loop in domestic form. 

The BSP's 2025 Financial Stability Report puts a number on the other side of this concentration: roughly Php 1.6 trillion, or 22.7% of total conglomerate debt, comes due between 2027 and 2029, while dollar-denominated debt averages 37.6% of that load over the following five years. That is a wall of maturities approaching the same financial system that holds much of the exposure. (Figure 4, lower image) 

Read in isolation, it is a refinancing-risk warning. Read alongside the MSME data, it shows why the system has a powerful institutional preference for preserving the liquidity and refinancing capacity of the large borrowers already embedded in it. 

And it competes for the same financial resources that the Magna Carta was supposed to direct toward smaller productive enterprises. 

The important point is that MSMEs are not simply being denied a fixed quantity of credit. 

They are being denied relative access to a financial system in which other borrowers have structural advantages: greater scale, better collateral, more predictable cash flows, lower transaction costs and, in many cases, greater access to cheap financing. 

Inflation worsens that relative disadvantage because it magnifies the very cash-flow uncertainty that already makes MSMEs harder to lend to. 

That is why the issue is not merely whether banks have enough liquidity. 

It is where the system finds that liquidity easiest and safest to deploy. 

VI. Why The Architecture Keeps Reproducing Itself 

A framework this consistently biased against MSME lending, across four administrations and two enforcement regimes, does not persist by accident. It persists because the institutions responsible for revising it are embedded in the financial system it regulates. 

The BSP Monetary Board's seven seats have been populated by appointees whose careers include senior positions at banks, multinational lenders and major conglomerates. None of this is evidence of wrongdoing; many were appointed precisely for the expertise those careers provide. 

But expertise is not institutionally neutral. 

A regulator whose personnel move between private finance and public regulation brings with them professional networks, assumptions and risk frameworks formed inside the financial system. From a public-choice perspective, those experiences can shape not only what policymakers know, but which problems they perceive as requiring intervention. 

That matters when the same system has spent sixteen years directing capital toward sovereign and large corporate borrowers while MSME lending steadily loses ground. 

This is regulatory capture in its least conspiratorial form. No corruption is required. A revolving door dynamic can reproduce a policy bias simply because the people designing the rules share much of the same institutional worldview as the institutions operating under them. 

And that is before accounting for the influence of the executive branch and broader political incentives. 

VII. Where The 2026 BSP Relief Cascade Fits 

The BSP's five relief measures since April — NPL grace periods, the intragroup credit-risk reform, the pre-positioned CCyB release, the salary-loan maturity extension and the mark-to-market waiver — did not create this problem. (See our Stagflation Part 11 for details) 

They reinforce it. 

The MSME credit decline predates all five measures by more than a decade. What the cascade does is free additional balance-sheet capacity without attaching an MSME condition to it, inside a financial system already structured to favor sovereign and large corporate exposure. 

The measures are therefore an aggravating factor, not the cause. 

That distinction matters because blaming the latest relief package would turn a sixteen-year structural failure into a story about five recent policy decisions. The evidence says otherwise: the same allocation bias was operating long before the current relief cycle existed. 

VIII. Conclusion: Three Symptoms, One Structure 

Declining MSME lending, banking-system concentration and rising financial fragility are not separate failures. 

They are symptoms of the same architecture. 

The Magna Carta tried to force banks to allocate more credit toward the country's 1.24 million MSMEs. But the monetary, regulatory and institutional structure surrounding the banking system kept making sovereign and large-corporate lending more attractive. 

The law could impose a quota. 

It could not repeal the incentives determining where banks wanted to put their balance sheets. 

For sixteen years, those incentives won. 

That is why the Magna Carta did not merely fail to achieve its target. 

It created the appearance of a financial system deliberately making room for the small productive economy while leaving the underlying allocation of capital largely untouched. 

The quota could be measured. Compliance has been reported. The policy could point to a statutory commitment to MSMEs. 

But underneath the paperwork, the balance sheet kept moving in the other direction. 

The result was not a redistribution of financial power toward the many. It was a regulatory façade over an increasingly concentrated allocation of credit. 

And that is the deeper failure of the Magna Carta: It did not change the architecture that favored the few. It gave that architecture a quota, and called it reform.