Central bank-led capitalism, remittances, and rentier consolidations in the Philippines

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Update, 28 June 2025: read the full article here.

I will be presenting this paper at the 2025 Annual AAG Meeting as part of a session titled Accounting for Space 2: The role of the state in financial infrastructures, and develops work I had first presented at Accounting for Space: A critical accounting / critical geography mini-conference, York University, 20 April 2023.

A final, peer reviewed form of this work is included in a special issue of Geoforum on the theme Accounting for Space.

Abstract

From 2001, remittances from overseas Filipinos allowed the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas to amass record US dollar reserves through market operations, and to successfully target inflation while keeping policy rates low. This saw a dramatic shift in the country’s political-economic position, historically marked by balance-of-payments crises and external indebtedness.

These conditions of low interest rates and dollar surpluses allowed the largest Philippine conglomerates to retire foreign and/or dollar-denominated debt in favor of longer-term, lower-rate, domestic, and/or peso-denominated debt. The market for these new issuances, in turn, was an oligopsony composed of the banking affiliates of the same conglomerates and their trust operations. This created new inter-conglomerate dependencies scaffolded by this shift in the debt market, and by BSP regulations limiting related party lending.

Meanwhile, the real estate arms of the same conglomerates expanded their underregulated quasi-lending activities, allowing for high rates of return from and the displacement of risk onto homebuyers. Much of the demand for real estate is driven by the same remittances from overseas Filipinos.

These developments have had the cumulative effect of supporting the maturation of a domestic capitalist class, and its consolidation around rentier advantages in banking, real estate, and infrastructure. The BSP has successfully managed risks that in the past have led to crises for domestic capitalists, and recent downturns have disrupted neither their composition nor their core interests. However, this system is also displacing risk onto a precarious homebuyer class, and creating new risks from the consolidation of an interdependent, value-extracting oligopoly.

Filipiniana collection development at York University, 2023–2024

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

For the Filipiniana collection development project of the Philippine Studies Group at York University, I coordinated the acquisition of 108 titles for donation to York University Libraries. This project was part of a grant from the Philippine government to enhance academic and research collaborations between York and Philippine universities.

Update, 4 March 2025: read the final report here.

A full list of titles acquired is available here. YCAR’s press release here.

We focused on titles that fell outside YUL’s usual acquisition channels: titles older than five years, from presses without Canadian distribution channels. Some highlights include 31 titles from the University of the Philippines Press, 11 from Ateneo de Manila University Press, and 5 from Anvil Publishing. We acquired a full set of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Philippine Arts: its final print run before it shifted to an online-only model.

We sought to reflect the strengths and interests of York’s Philippine Studies community: performing arts, gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, economic history and geography, and environmental studies and climate change. We also tried to fill some gaps in York’s current collection with titles on social movements, Mindanao, and conflict and reconciliation.

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“We must systematically ‘de-Marcosify’ Philippine society”

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

On the embedded precursors and unintended consequences of Edsa Republic privatizations

This article revisits the privatizations carried out after the Edsa Revolution, emphasizing historical context, the agency of Filipinos working within technocratic and bureaucratic spaces, and institutional path-dependence. It shows how a moralized understanding of the state’s role in the economy was rehearsed and developed by the revolutionary Aquino government (1986–7) through the reorganization of the Government-Owned or Controlled Corporation (GOCC) portfolio. Focusing on the Presidential Commission on Government Reorganization (PCGR), it traces how the design and objectives of privatization reflected both “people-powered” ambitions, as well as a distinct, historically-embedded ambivalence toward public enterprise. In turn, these departures from mainline neoliberalism shaped a key feature of the Edsa Republic: the continuity of rentierism as the dominant mode of accumulation, despite the apparent rupture of revolution.

I presented this paper at the 2024 Association for Asian Studies annual conference in Seattle, and builds on my 2022 presentation at the Philippine Studies Conference in Japan.

A version of it was published on Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints as The EDSA Republic as moral liquidator: Embedded origins, unintended consequences.

Access the full article through Project Muse here.

My thanks to my co-panellists Inigo Chotirawe Acosta, Johnny Bassett, and Claire Cororaton, and to our reactor, Dr. Taihei Okada.

Two premises

Kenneth Cardenas1 Comment

For political imagination, and for varieties of possibility

Open file no. 50, began 24 October 2023

Sa sandaling matutunan mo ang managinip nang lubusang gising,
na ibalanse ang kamalayan hindi sa talim ng pangangatwiran
ngunit sa dobleng katig ng katwiran at panaginip;
sa sandaling matutunan mo ito,
mabibitawan mo lamang ito sa oras na mabitawan mo
kung paano magisip.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Ang Salita Para Sa Daigdig Ay Gubat

Ang tunay na radikal ay ang gawing abot-kamay ang pag-asa,
hindi ang patunayan ang pagka-gipit.

Raymond Williams

As I wrap up my dissertation, and as I take part in conversations about energy transitions, alternative transnational economies and solidarities, and climate crisis responses other than war, I have found myself turning and returning to two premises. 

These arose as I came to my own understanding of how accumulation and class power had developed in the Philippines over five centuries of capitalist and colonial encounter.  

I am finding, again and again, that many analytical categories that had developed in response to realities found elsewhere have very limited usefulness here.  

This incongruency between concepts and realities is hinted at by the recurrent (evergreen?) mode of production debates within Philippine critical thought: is the Philippines a capitalist society, or is it semi-feudal, semi-colonial?  

Maybe it is both and neither: the debate continues because both descriptions help explain some features of the systems we wish to describe and resist. Yet neither does justice to life as it arises within, alongside, and outside these systems.  

If you and I agree, then we need to trace the reasons behind the poor conceptual fit.  

These two premises also arose out of wanting to make hope possible, not despair convincing. I want to react to the rigid radicalism and damage-based research that I keep running into—and keep reproducing, myself.

If the whole point of ‘theory’ is ‘seeing’, I would much rather now learn ways of seeing that open up rather than foreclose political imagination. Instead of learning how to see lack, I would rather learn how to see varieties of possibility—especially in landscapes dismissed as wastelands.

If you and I agree, then we need to find a way to take part in conversations in a way that brings these abilities out—even among the most inflexible critical theory bores in our worlds.

Some rough, ongoing thoughts, under constant revision, shared here so we can pick up where we left off:

Continue reading “Two premises” →