Almost four year ago, I wrote an entry “Flying the Coop” in which I observed:

A recent news item says that more pilots have been leaving the country for greener pastures overseas. Philippine Airlines, Inc. (PAL) has lost about 20% of its pilots over the last three years and more are about to fly the coop. This is an alarming development in our continuing brain drain. Even our best trained and highest compensated professionals are packing their bags. A desperate policy resolution from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration limiting the number of pilots who can work for international airlines has failed to stem the tide.

Things have apparently gotten worse since. Over the weekend, at least 23 international and domestic PAL flights have been cancelled due to the fact that there were no pilots to fly PAL planes. Eight more flights were cancelled today. Read the rest of this entry »

This item in the New York Times will turn a lot of us green with envy. My jaw dropped with when I read it.

The global economic downturn doesn’t seem like such a bad thing after all, if you’re an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate Meagher and Flom, the largest U.S. law firm in terms of revenue. Due to the recession, which would predictably cut into its projected revenues, Skadden has offered its 1,300 associates worldwide 80,000 U.S. dollars each to take the year off. They’re encouraged to find pro-bono work and render meaningful service to any cause of their choice although “the lawyers could also spend the year catching up on every episode of “Top Chef” that they missed during the boom years, or traveling around the world“. Read the rest of this entry »

Apart from the expected loss of jobs, drop in consumer spending, deflation and usual run-of-the-mill outcomes arising from the worldwide recession, there are other trends which may prove interesting to the idle observer. And their numbers are certainly growing everyday.

The hard times will of course impact fashion. Amando Doronila wrote a recent piece on the rise and fall of women’s hemlines which mirror the bleak global economic outlook. Expect a less flamboyant look for the coming year and for so long as the downturn continues. A more muted and conservative image would be in keeping with the difficulties we all face. Read the rest of this entry »

Why do scams like the Ponzi schemes perpetrated by Bernard Madoff and Celso De Los Angeles’ Legacy Group happen with sickening regularity, particularly in the Philippines ? There are undoubtedly bad guys out there, pathological crooks who get their cash and kicks from ruining people’s lives by defrauding them. They are the financial equivalent of serial criminals, according to the New York Times in an article on Madoff, heartless killers who will cut your still-beating heart out and have it for breakfast:

“Some of the characteristics you see in psychopaths are lying, manipulation, the ability to deceive, feelings of grandiosity and callousness toward their victims,” says Gregg O. McCrary, a former special agent with the F.B.I. who spent years constructing criminal behavioral profiles.

Mr. McCrary xxx says Mr. Madoff appears to share many of the destructive traits typically seen in a psychopath. That is why, he says, so many who came into contact with Mr. Madoff have been left reeling and in confusion about his motives.

“People like him become sort of like chameleons. They are very good at impression management,” Mr. McCrary says.

But other factors are at play. Like all predators, they actively seek their prey. The sad thing is that their victims oftentimes come to them, like bugs to a Venus fly trap. Read the rest of this entry »

Bernard Madoff from cityfile.com

Celso De Los Angeles from the website of Sto. Domingo, Albay.

I haven’t blogged in almost two weeks and I miss it. Unfortunately, the demands of adjusting to a new work environment has kept me busy and too mentally exhausted to keep up with the news. I literally haven’t seen a weekday sunset for the past month.

In an effort to catch up, I checked out Manolo Quezon’s blog. The shock of seeing all the crisis situations which unfolded over the past week or so was like a kick in the balls. Between the tanking economy and retrenched jobs, to a spate of bank failures, the perennial problem of corruption in high places, to the specter of narcopolitics, my anxiety level shot through the roof. I wanted to draw the blinds and crawl back to my La-Z-Boy. I get the feeling that the worst is yet to come.

As we lurch from one economic catastrophe to another, we can take cold comfort in the fact that financial scams are not unique to us. In terms of scope, nothing can beat the con perpetuated by Bernard Madoff, until recently a lion in Wall Street, who turned out to be a rat. With apologies to the intrepid New York City rats. In yet another variation on the time-worn Ponzi scheme, Madoff scammed an estimated U.S.$ 50 billion from various institutional and individual investors spanning the globe. Madoff defrauded Jewish charities, European royalty, prominent politicians and celebrities like Steven Spielberg and Larry King, even Arab banks. According to the criminal complaint filed against him, Madoff “deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in losses of approximately billions of dollars.” Basically, as he himself admitted, he ran a Ponzi scheme on a large, complicated and transnational scale. But like any Ponzi scheme, it was a fraudulent set-up where investors are paid out of money taken from subsequent investors instead of real business profits. Bamboozling Pedro to pay Juan, and so on. At some point, all Ponzi schemes are bound to collapse like the proverbial house of cards.

Major banks worldwide which were affected include the Spanish bank Grupo Santander SA, at least four French banks including BNP Paribas and Societe Generale, Britain’s HSBC Holdings PLC and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, and Japan’s Nomura Holdings. Even financial powerhouse J.P. Morgan almost got burned but managed to pull out a few months before Madoff was arrested, under suspicious circumstances and without informing its clients who remained exposed to the risks of Madoff’s spurious hedge funds. Not a few Morgan investors who lost their shirts are now contemplating a lawsuit against the bank. Read the rest of this entry »