Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there's the threat of a contraction in the economy, they'll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one—Milton Friedman
In this
issue:
Stagflation Part 6: The Banking System Under Siege—Bond Selloffs,
Liquidity Illusions, and the Coming Balance Sheet Reckoning
I. Introduction: Markets Are Repricing the Stagflation
Regime
II. Sovereign Repricing Is Becoming a Banking Problem
III. The Liquidity Boom Concealed Structural Fragility
IV. March 2026: Hidden Cost of Relief Measures
V. Bank Liquidity Improved—But Mainly Through Deposit
Expansion
VI. The Wile E. Coyote’s Denominator Effect
VII. Sovereign Absorption, AFS Portfolios, and Hidden
Duration Stress
VIII. Reflexivity: When Accommodation Starts Feeding
Instability
IX. The Savings-Investment Gap: From Development Narrative
to Stagflationary Dependence
X. Why the Oil Shock Broke Mainstream Models
XI. The Banking Contradiction: Why System Normalization Is a
Mirage
XII. Conclusion: Accommodation Without Resolution Redux
Stagflation Part 6: The Banking System Under Siege—Bond Selloffs, Liquidity Illusions, and the Coming Balance Sheet Reckoning
How inflation, sovereign dependence, and financial repression are turning banks into the shock absorbers of a stagflationary regime.
I. Introduction: Markets Are Repricing the Stagflation Regime
On Friday, May 15, 2026, the USDPHP closed at a record 61.721—another historic low for the peso and its 16th record high of the year. Every prior “comfort level” for the currency has effectively been erased. The peso is now among Asia’s worst-performing currencies year-to-date.
Yet the peso’s decline may not even be the most important
market signal.
Figure 1
Far more consequential is the ongoing repricing inside the domestic bond market. BVAL Treasury yields—particularly at the belly of the curve—have surged beyond prior cycle highs, while longer-dated maturities are rapidly approaching 2022 stress levels (Figure 1)
The move no longer resembles a temporary inflation scare or speculative overshoot. Markets are increasingly repricing sovereign, inflation, and currency risk simultaneously.
The distinction matters.
Peso weakness reflects external imbalance. But rising bond yields directly strike the balance sheets of the Philippine banking system.
Banks sit at the center of the country’s macro-financial structure. Backstopped by the BSP, they financed the pandemic rescue cycle, intermediated the post-pandemic liquidity surge, absorbed expanding government debt issuance, and enabled credit expansion into politically favored sectors. In the process, banks became increasingly exposed to the very distortions created by the policies that artificially sustained nominal growth.
Mainstream narratives continue to describe the banking system as “well-capitalized,” “liquid,” and “resilient.” But these are largely backward-looking accounting conditions rather than forward-looking assessments of systemic vulnerability.
The issue is not whether banks currently satisfy regulatory ratios. The issue is the sustainability of a macro-financial structure that has become increasingly dependent on continual liquidity accommodation, regulatory forbearance, and suppressed volatility to prevent the emergence of deeper systemic stress.
That is the deeper significance of stagflation.
Stagflation is not merely the coexistence of inflation and slowing growth. It is the progressive collision between inflation persistence, fiscal dependence, external fragility, and financial leverage.
And in the Philippines, those pressures are increasingly converging on the banking system.
II. Sovereign Repricing Is Becoming a Banking Problem
Much of the recent discussion surrounding Philippine market turbulence has focused on USDPHP. But the more consequential development may be occurring inside the domestic bond market.
The scale of the Philippine bond selloff is not background noise. It is the primary transmission mechanism through which macroeconomic stress migrates into bank balance sheets.
Figure 2
Philippine Treasury securities have been among Asia’s worst-performing bonds in 2026 following the Iran War, with Philippine 10-year yields rising the most among ASEAN bonds. (Figure 2, top and middle windows)
Ironically, this deterioration has unfolded even as the Philippines prepares for inclusion in the JP Morgan Emerging Market Debt Index in January 2027. Would JPMorgan issue a downgrade?
The significance of the selloff is frequently misunderstood.
For banks, rising yields are not merely inconvenient market fluctuations. Higher yields translate directly into mark-to-market losses, duration stress, weaker securities valuations, and tighter liquidity conditions.
This matters because Philippine banks substantially increased exposure to government securities beginning in 2015, with the trend accelerating during the pandemic era. Banks’ net claims on the central government (NCoCG) rose, alongside public debt hitting all-time highs last March with NCoCG at PHP 6.258 trillion accounting for 33% of the PHP 18.488 trillion public debt. (Figure 2, lowest image)
The pandemic response institutionalized a regime in which:
- fiscal deficits exploded,
- BSP liquidity injections surged,
- banks absorbed massive sovereign issuance,
- and government debt became increasingly embedded as collateral throughout the financial system.
That framework functioned as long as:
- inflation remained politically manageable,
- the peso avoided disorderly depreciation,
- and yields stayed artificially suppressed.
Stagflation changes the equation.
Persistent inflation forces markets to demand higher nominal yields. External fragility pressures the currency. Fiscal dependence requires continual debt issuance even as government borrowing increasingly crowds out private credit formation. Every upward move in yields simultaneously erodes the market value of existing bond holdings.
This is why the present environment matters.
- The repricing is occurring precisely when:
- public debt remains elevated,
- fiscal deficits remain structurally wide,
- external financing conditions are tightening,
- and growth quality is deteriorating.
In effect, banks are becoming trapped between sovereign financing dependence and market repricing.
The system cannot easily tolerate market-clearing yields because the fiscal structure, banking system, and asset markets have all become deeply dependent on suppressed financing costs.
Yet suppressing yields amid inflation and peso weakness merely transfers pressure into currency depreciation, financial repression, and deeper balance-sheet distortions.
This is the core contradiction of financial repression.
The state increasingly depends on banks to intermediate expanding sovereign debt burdens even as inflation and currency weakness steadily erode the real foundations supporting those balance sheets.
III. The Liquidity Boom Concealed Structural Fragility
The banking pressures now emerging did not appear spontaneously. They were incubated even before the post-pandemic liquidity cycle.
For years, policymakers and mainstream economists treated liquidity expansion as a stabilizing force. Rapid M2 and M3 growth were interpreted as signs of recovery, resilience, and normalization.
Figure 3
Credit (domestic claims) and liquidity (M2) expansion as a share of GDP have been rising since 2011, accelerated in pre-pandemic 2019, and have since reached key milestones. The GDP’s ever-deepening dependence underscores bank-led financialization, even as the GDP rate continues downward path. (Figure 3, topmost pane)
But liquidity creation is NEVER neutral.
The critical issue is not simply the quantity of money creation, but where newly created liquidity enters the system first and how credit allocation is shaped by political and institutional incentives.
In classic Cantillon effect-fashion, the earliest beneficiaries of post-pandemic liquidity expansion were sectors closest to BSP’s sovereign financing and bank credit intermediation—the primary sources of money creation.
Liquidity increasingly flowed into:
- government financing,
- real estate carry structures,
- politically connected infrastructure,
- speculative financial activities,
- electricity and utility-related lending,
- and consumer leverage amplified by credit card rate caps.
As a result, credit card lending surged even as household purchasing power weakened.
Electricity and utility-related lending climbed sharply since 2024 despite deteriorating GDP. (Figure 3, middle graph)
Consumer finance became one of the banking system’s primary growth engines since the pandemic even as real wage pressures intensified. (Figure 3, lowest diagram)
This created the appearance of nominal resilience.
But much of the expansion reflected liquidity recycling rather than productivity-driven growth. The banking system increasingly functioned as a transmission mechanism for sustaining aggregate demand despite weakening real income conditions.
That distinction is critical.
When economies rely on debt expansion to preserve consumption amid deteriorating purchasing power, balance sheets gradually become more fragile beneath the surface.
Stagflation magnifies this process because inflation compresses household cash flows while slowing real activity weakens repayment capacity.
Banks may initially report:
- strong nominal loan growth,
- healthy net interest margins,
- and stable headline balance-sheet conditions.
But over time, the quality of that growth deteriorates.
The result is a system where:
- nominal lending remains elevated,
- asset prices become increasingly policy-dependent,
- and underlying credit quality quietly weakens beneath the surface.
This is why banking stress under stagflation is often delayed rather than immediate.
Liquidity masks fragility for awhile.
Then inflation, higher yields, and slowing real activity begin to expose it.
IV. March 2026: Hidden Cost of Relief Measures
The BSP’s April 2026 regulatory and loan relief measures—officially framed as emergency support for the oil shock—should not be interpreted as neutral policy tools.
Relief regimes redistribute risk asymmetrically.
Large banks, politically connected borrowers, and institutions with privileged regulatory access typically receive greater flexibility, balance-sheet protection, and time than smaller firms or ordinary households. In that sense, crisis accommodation functions not merely as stabilization policy, but as a mechanism that risks deepening moral hazard and reinforcing regulatory capture.
This institutional structure matters because the BSP’s policymaking apparatus remains deeply intertwined with the banking establishment itself, populated largely by former executives from major domestic banks and multinational financial institutions.
The issue is not necessarily conspiracy, but institutional incentive alignment: policymakers shaped by the same financial architecture they supervise will naturally tend to prioritize preservation of that structure. Experience and familiarity shapes incentives. Networks shape policy reflexes. Politically connected interest groups also shape policy trajectories.
Against that backdrop, March 2026 marked the transition phase before the formal implementation of April’s relief measures.
Echoing aspects of the pandemic playbook, banks were likely already repositioning balance sheets in anticipation of regulatory flexibility, liquidity support, prudential accommodation, and accounting relief.
V. Bank Liquidity Improved—But Mainly Through Deposit Expansion
March
banking data showed a modest improvement in headline liquidity conditions,
though the rebound was driven primarily by deposit expansion rather than
internally generated balance-sheet strengthening.
Figure 4
Cash and due from banks posted their first expansion since August 2024, lifting the cash-to-deposit ratio marginally from February’s record lows. Yet despite the rebound, liquidity buffers remained historically thin. (Figure 4, topmost image)
The apparent improvement largely reflected accelerating deposit growth.
Peso and FX deposits both strengthened during Q1, consistent with the sharp rebound in M2 and M3 liquidity growth. BSP accommodation had likely already begun filtering through the banking system even before the formal April relief package. (Figure 4, middle visual)
Yet beneath the headline stabilization, underlying liquidity conditions remained fragile.
Liquid assets-to-deposits continued drifting downward toward pre-rescue March 2020 levels, suggesting banks were still operating with structurally compressed liquidity cushions despite years of extraordinary accommodation.
The apparent stabilization therefore reflected funding inflows more than genuine liquidity resilience.
That distinction matters because stagflation eventually tests liquidity quality—not merely liquidity quantity.
VI. The Wile E. Coyote’s Denominator Effect
March banking data appeared superficially stable.
Headline nonperforming loan (NPL) ratios remained broadly steady. But this stability increasingly resembles what we have repeatedly described as the banking system’s Wile E. Coyote denominator effect—where deteriorating fundamentals become statistically obscured by rapid balance-sheet expansion. (Figure 4, lowest chart)
Gross nonperforming loans climbed to fresh record nominal highs in March or bad loans continued rising.
Denominator growth simply outran visible recognition or rapid Total Loan Portfolio (TLP) expansion temporarily compressed headline NPL ratios, masking the deterioration emerging underneath the surface.
Stable ratios can therefore conceal worsening underlying conditions.
The same pattern increasingly appeared in loan-loss provisioning.
Figure 5
Allowance for credit losses rose to near-record levels. At first glance, this appeared reassuring—a sign of prudence and reserve accumulation. (Figure 5, topmost chart)
But once again, denominator growth mattered.
Provisioning growth lagged behind TLP expansion, causing reserve ratios to soften despite intensifying macroeconomic stress.
This raises an increasingly uncomfortable question:
Are provisions genuinely strengthening resilience, or
merely struggling to keep pace with an increasingly leveraged and slowing
credit structure?
Under normal expansionary conditions, rapid credit growth can dilute emerging stress and stabilize reported metrics.
But stagflation changes the equation.
If slowing growth weakens repayment capacity while inflation compresses household cash flow, denominator support itself begins to weaken.
That is when the
Wile E. Coyote effect comes into play. It exposes the statistical artifice
hidden behind the headline numbers. What once appeared statistically stable
deteriorates rapidly once loan growth slows and hidden losses become harder to
dilute.
Like Wile E.
Coyote, once he realizes he has run far past the cliff, gravity takes hold.
VII. Sovereign Absorption, AFS Portfolios, and Hidden Duration Stress
The sovereign absorption trade also intensified.
Banks continued aggressively accumulating government-linked assets, reinforcing the increasingly symbiotic relationship between fiscal deficits and bank balance sheets.
Held-to-Maturity (HTM) securities presently reclassified as “Debt Securities- Net of Amortization” climbed to record highs, reflecting continued sovereign intermediation. HTMs accounted for 67% of NCoCG. (Figure 5, middle chart)
At the same time, Available-for-Sale (AFS) portfolios surged sharply. (Figure 5, lowest diagram)
On paper, rising securities holdings appear consistent with liquidity strength.
Under stagflation, however, they increasingly become a source of vulnerability.
The recent repricing in Philippine Treasury yields—particularly at the belly of the curve—directly pressures AFS portfolios through mark-to-market losses.
This creates a predictable institutional response.
Banks increasingly face incentives to migrate securities toward HTM classification, where unrealized market losses avoid immediate recognition.
But this merely alters accounting treatment.
It does not eliminate duration risk.
HTM migration may suppress accounting volatility, but it also reduces balance-sheet flexibility by locking assets into longer-duration structures that become less liquid under stress.
In effect, banks increasingly face a tradeoff between accounting stability and actual balance-sheet resilience.
Signs of strain are already beginning to emerge beneath headline stability.
Figure 6
Banking sector’s income growth remained near stagnation in Q1 2026, rising only 2.86%, as accumulated market losses continued suppressing profitability. Financial market-related losses remained elevated at roughly Php 43.5 billion—persistently sustained since Q2 2025 and approaching pandemic-era stress peak levels recorded in Q4 2020. (Figure 6, topmost pane)
At the same time, balance-sheet pressures intensified. Despite record investment holdings, accumulated foreign exchange and fixed-income valuation losses surged toward Php 120 billion in March, revisiting conditions last seen during the December 2022 repricing cycle. Valuation losses have accompanied the spike in 10-year yields. (Figure 6, middle chart)
At the same time, dependence on wholesale funding continued rising, with bank borrowings reaching fresh record highs in March. (Figure 6, lowest graph)
These developments matter because they suggest the banking system entered the oil-shock phase already carrying unresolved vulnerabilities—even before the full effects of stagflation have emerged.
VIII. Reflexivity: When Accommodation Starts Feeding Instability
The deeper problem is that banking conditions are becoming increasingly reflexive.
- BSP accommodation boosts liquidity.
- Banks expand nominal credit.
- Credit growth reinforces inflation persistence.
- Inflation pressures bond yields higher.
- Higher yields weaken securities portfolios.
Banks then become increasingly dependent on regulatory relief, accounting migration, and additional liquidity support to preserve stability.
Authorities subsequently face pressure to deliver even more accommodation to prevent broader financial stress.
Rather than resolving fragility, accommodation increasingly delays recognition while compounding the imbalances generating the stress itself.
This is why March 2026 matters.
The banking system did not enter the oil-shock phase from
a position of clear strength.
It entered with:
- thin liquidity cushions,
- rising sovereign exposure,
- growing duration risk,
- weakening profitability quality,
- and balance sheets increasingly dependent on denominator growth to suppress visible deterioration.
In that sense, the BSP’s April relief measures do not represent resolution.
They may instead buy time at the cost of deeper sovereign dependence, greater balance-sheet distortion, and the continued accumulation of unresolved imbalances.
What emerges is not crisis resolution, but the institutionalization of permanent accommodation as the operating framework of the financial system.
IX. The Savings-Investment Gap: From Development Narrative
to Stagflationary Dependence
Figure 7
One of the least discussed yet the most critical indicator of the Philippine economy’s underlying fragility resurfaced in Q1 2026: the savings-investment (S-I) gap widened to Php 1.03 trillion, the largest in two years. (Figure 7, upper image)
At first glance, orthodox macroeconomic interpretation treats this as manageable—even desirable.
Weak private demand supposedly justifies larger public spending to sustain GDP growth.
Under this framework, government borrowing and expenditure become stabilizing tools: when households retrench and private firms hesitate, the state steps in as spender, borrower, allocator, and increasingly, guarantor of aggregate demand.
But this framing obscure deeper structural problems.
The S-I gap’s weakness as a framework begins with the fact that it is fundamentally an accounting identity:
savings minus investment equals the current account balance.
But accounting identities explain what balances, not whether the underlying structure generating those balances is sustainable.
A widening S-I gap signals that domestic savings are increasingly insufficient to internally finance the economy’s investment requirements.
That gap must be financed somehow:
- domestic borrowing,
- foreign borrowing,
- monetary accommodation,
- or inflationary erosion of purchasing power.
In practice, the Philippines has increasingly relied on all four.
Yet even the accounting itself deserves scrutiny.
GDP-based national income statistics classify government construction and public expenditures as “investment” regardless of whether such projects satisfy market tests of profitability, cash-flow viability, or sustainable demand.
Unlike private capital formation—disciplined by profit and loss—politically allocated spending often survives through taxation, subsidies, refinancing, regulatory privilege, or continued deficit support.
That distinction matters.
The deeper issue is not merely that investment exceeds savings.
The issue is whether debt-financed and liquidity-supported investment generates sufficient productive capacity to repay the claims being created today.
If not, the system gradually becomes dependent on:
- continual debt issuance,
- BSP accommodation,
- financial repression,
- inflation leakage,
- and sustained regulatory interventions
simply to maintain nominal growth.
This is where the government debt story becomes inseparable from the S-I gap.
The Philippines increasingly appears trapped in a feedback loop where weak domestic savings require greater dependence on debt expansion, while debt-financed growth itself weakens incentives for genuine savings formation.
Public debt may still appear manageable relative to advanced economies.
But such comparisons are misleading.
The issue is not merely debt-to-GDP ratios. Q1 debt/GDP hit 65.2%—a 21 year high, although the Palace did raise their supposed ceiling/ debt metric to 70% last year. (Figure 7, lower graph)
The issue is whether the economy possesses a sufficiently productive and self-sustaining capital structure capable of carrying rising debt burdens without continual intervention.
Much of recent growth has increasingly depended on:
- public spending,
- sovereign borrowing,
- liquidity expansion,
- credit-financed speculation and capital misallocation,
- and consumption smoothing through leverage.
Banks increasingly sit at the center of this arrangement.
As fiscal financing requirements expand, financial institutions absorb rising sovereign issuance, redirecting balance sheets toward government exposure. Domestic savings that might otherwise finance entrepreneurial activity and decentralized capital formation increasingly fund deficit spending instead.
This is the sovereign-bank nexus.
The more the state depends on debt expansion, the more banks become intertwined with fiscal sustainability itself.
The result is not necessarily immediate displacement, but gradual crowding out through balance-sheet absorption. Capital increasingly flows toward politically backed financing channels rather than decentralized entrepreneurial allocation. Over time, this dynamic contributes to rising funding costs, weaker private-sector dynamism, and greater systemic dependence on policy support.
This dynamic helps explain the coexistence of:
- slowing real growth,
- persistent inflation pressures,
- weakening household balance sheets,
- deteriorating external accounts,
- peso weakness,
- and repeated liquidity accommodation.
The S-I gap therefore becomes more than a macroeconomic statistic.
It represents a blueprint of the political economy’s development structure itself.
The widening imbalance reflects an institutional
preference for:
- demand management over productivity reform,
- centralized allocation over decentralized capital formation,
- and short-term GDP optics over long-term savings formation.
Under stagflationary conditions, these dependencies
become progressively harder to sustain without some combination of:
- higher inflation,
- deeper financial repression,
- currency weakness,
- slower real growth,
- or escalating policy interventions.
The irony is difficult to ignore.
Policies justified as temporary stimulus to compensate
for private-sector weakness may gradually become one of the mechanisms
entrenching that weakness in the first place.
X. Why the Oil Shock Broke Mainstream Models
The recent Iran War oil shock exposed more than a forecasting error. It revealed a deeper epistemological problem embedded in mainstream macroeconomics—and the fragility of the broader economic structure underlying its models.
Consensus inflation forecasts largely treated price pressures as transitory and primarily supply-driven. Yet econometric models depend on assumptions of relatively stable relationships between variables derived from past statistical regularities. Under asymmetric policy intervention, regime shifts, and politically conditioned responses, however, the sequence and transmission of economic effects become nonlinear and unstable.
Here, Hayek’s knowledge problem resurfaces. Dispersed human adaptation cannot be compressed into static coefficients without losing critical information. Households, firms, banks, and investors continuously adjust behavior in response to policy signals, financing stress, and deteriorating expectations. Besides, aggregates don’t capture individual utilities.
Once BSP and government intervention themselves became dominant market variables—through FX defense, liquidity management, subsidies, emergency powers, and CPI-conditioned signaling—the system became increasingly reflexive. Forecasts influenced behavior, behavior altered transmission channels, and the assumptions underlying the forecasts deteriorated in real time.
This is also where Goodhart’s Law becomes relevant. Once CPI evolved into a political metric of credibility, policies increasingly targeted the appearance of price stability while structural imbalances accumulated elsewhere in the system. Statistical stability increasingly masked mounting financial and economic fragility.
The recent oil shock exposed how vulnerable this framework had become.
Higher oil and electricity costs did not merely raise transport expenses.
They cascaded throughout the economy by:
- weakening household cash flow,
- compressing corporate margins,
- increasing dependence on consumer credit,
- and intensifying financing stress across sectors.
Policymakers increasingly responded through:
- subsidies,
- price suppression,
- emergency powers,
- regulatory accommodation,
- and politically mediated financing mechanisms.
But intervention does not eliminate scarcity or losses.
It merely redistributes them across balance sheets.
And much of that redistribution increasingly lands on:
- banks,
- consumers,
- currency markets,
- and sovereign financing channels.
This is why the EO-110 framework matters beyond energy policy.
Once emergency intervention becomes normalized, financial systems gradually evolve toward permanent crisis management layered on top of earlier pandemic-era accommodation.
Banks then cease functioning purely as market intermediaries.
They increasingly become quasi-fiscal transmission mechanisms for stabilizing politically sensitive sectors and sustaining nominal demand.
If inflation forecasting failed because intervention distorted price signals and altered transmission mechanisms, then the same critique increasingly applies to GDP interpretation itself.
Again, macroeconomic models rely on assumptions of relatively stable relationships, functioning price signals, and coherent feedback mechanisms. But once policy intervention persistently reshapes incentives, suppresses market adjustments, and redirects capital flows, aggregate output statistics become progressively less reflective of underlying productive conditions.
GDP then risks evolving from supposedly a “neutral and objective” measure of economic activity into a politically conditioned artifact of intervention-driven stabilization.
XI. The Banking Contradiction: Why System Normalization Is a Mirage
The contradiction facing the Philippine banking system is no longer merely financial.
It is increasingly political, institutional, and macroeconomic.
After years of liquidity support, sovereign absorption, and intervention-driven stabilization, policymakers increasingly face objectives that are difficult to reconcile simultaneously.
Authorities want:
- growth without recession,
- lower inflation without adjustment costs,
- currency stability without external rebalancing,
- rising public spending without disorderly debt repricing,
- and a resilient banking system without materially tighter financial conditions.
But these objectives increasingly conflict.
Containing inflation requires tighter liquidity conditions.
Yet tighter liquidity risks slowing credit growth, exposing weaker borrowers, and amplifying stress in already leveraged sectors.
Allowing yields to rise restores market pricing.
But higher yields increase government financing costs while simultaneously eroding the value of bank-held sovereign securities.
Supporting the peso may stabilize inflation expectations.
But it also tightens financial conditions in an economy already dependent on credit expansion.
Meanwhile, renewed liquidity accommodation preserves short-term stability but reinforces inflation persistence and sovereign dependence.
The complexity of the feedback loops escalates.
This is the banking contradiction of stagflation:
the policy required to resolve one imbalance increasingly intensifies another.
The Philippine banking system sits at the center of these tensions because it has become deeply embedded in:
- sovereign financing,
- household leverage,
- liquidity transmission,
- and policy stabilization itself.
This is what distinguishes the current environment from a conventional credit cycle.
In normal downturns, banks primarily absorb credit losses.
Under stagflation, banks become transmission mechanisms for multiple overlapping pressures:
- inflation,
- currency weakness,
- fiscal dependence,
- bond repricing,
- and slowing real activity.
The result is not necessarily immediate instability.
The greater risk is policy paralysis driven by structural contradiction.
Authorities increasingly rely on path dependent responses:
- selective tightening,
- targeted relief,
- expanded public spending,
- liquidity support,
- moral suasion,
- shaping media narratives,
- accounting flexibility,
- and regulatory accommodation.
But hybrid regimes rarely resolve underlying imbalances.
They instead delay recognition while deepening structural dependence on future intervention.
This is why “normalization” becomes progressively more difficult.
The longer accommodation persists, the more balance sheets adapt to its presence. Imbalances accumulate. Risk becomes embedded in expectations. And even modest tightening can generate disproportionate stress.
That is the deeper trajectory of the current cycle.
The question is no longer whether the banking system appears stable today.
The question is whether it can reduce its dependence on a framework of continual accommodation, subsidy, and intervention—or whether that dependence eventually defines the limits of the system through disorderly adjustment.
XII. Conclusion: Accommodation Without Resolution Redux
The Philippine banking system is not facing an immediate crisis (yet).
Headline capitalization remains intact. Liquidity has stabilized temporarily. Regulatory ratios still signal resilience.
But stagflation rarely begins through sudden collapse.
More often, fragility accumulates gradually beneath the surface, exacerbating existing imbalances while policy intervention delays recognition.
This is increasingly the pattern now emerging.
Rising sovereign dependence, widening savings deficiencies, credit-financed malinvestments, peso weakness, bond-market repricing, and slowing real growth are converging on the same balance sheets policymakers increasingly rely upon to sustain stability.
The contradiction is difficult to escape.
Banks are expected to finance fiscal expansion, absorb duration risk, support credit growth, and remain resilient—all while inflation, external fragility, and political intervention steadily distort the price signals that normally discipline risk.
The danger is not merely weaker profitability or rising bad loans.
The greater risk is a system that becomes progressively dependent on continual accommodation simply to preserve the appearance of stability.
More concerning still is the INTENSIFYING POLITICIZATION of the industry as it is increasingly mobilized to serve the deepening financing needs of the state.
That is the deeper meaning of the current cycle.
The issue is no longer whether the banking system appears stable today.
The issue is whether the foundations sustaining that stability are becoming increasingly fragile beneath the surface.
The Philippine banking system may not yet be in crisis.
But it is increasingly operating under siege—and drifting toward one.
___
References
1 Stagflation
Is Already Here—Emergency Policies Are Now Entrenching It
2 Stagflation
by Design: Policy Contradictions and the Return of the Pandemic Rescue Playbook
4 Stagflation
Then and Now: Why Philippine Markets Are Repricing Like the 1970s (Part 4)
Seed Article:
