falling Peso value
When we arrived in Manila in March, we got 40.25 pesos per dollar over the counter. Since then, the United States dollar has been grossly devalued by the wanton printing of funny money by the Treasury Department. Nonetheless, I have observed weekly in the newspapers an increasingly favorable (for me) dollar-to-peso exchange rate. The past several days we have seen an interbank exchange rate of 49.7 -49.9 pesos per dollar. Today a dollar buys 50 pesos.
My purchasing power has increased, and ten percent of the Philippines’ economy is U.S. dollars sent from Filipino expatriates back to the homeland. These days, the dollars transmitted from foreign lands to relatives back in the Philippines can buy one-fifth more pesos than they could in March!
