FINANCIAL MARKETS in the first quarter of 2021 continued to be driven by developments surrounding the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic with the arrival of vaccines lifting investor sentiment in the early part of the quarter before being offset by the renewed strict lockdowns due to a fresh surge in coronavirus cases.

ANALYSTS remain cautiously optimistic on bank stocks amid uncertainties surrounding the prospects of easing lockdown restrictions and the pace of vaccinations, which would influence demand for loans as well as the willingness of banks to lend.

The pandemic found the government in the midst of an airport building frenzy, no doubt based on ambitious assumptions for financial returns before COVID-19 shut the world down. But now that travel demand is going to be depressed for the foreseeable future and the airlines the airports were meant to serve as gleaming new home bases hanging on precariously, many of the projects could be in for a hard rethink, because by the time they are all built or upgraded, the travel volumes they were designed around might not be there for years.

THE TRANSITION to imported natural gas was dictated by the impending depletion of the Philippines’ only indigenous provider of the resource, the Malampaya project. Malampaya provides fuel to natural gas-fired power plants in Batangas, which account for around 30% of the Luzon grid’s power needs. But with the field’s commercially viable reserves expected to run out by 2024, the power industry is racing to build out the infrastructure needed to bring in the gas and keep the power plants running.   

AT THE PANGUIL Bay Bridge groundbreaking ceremony on Nov. 28, 2018, President Rodrigo R. Duterte trumpeted the coming “seemingly endless roads and bridges” across the archipelago that will be built under his administration’s “Build, Build, Build” (BBB) infrastructure program.

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