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Freed Peso. The court quarrel over the bank governorship gave Macapagal time to huddle with his advisers. Using an exhaustive World Bank report and other studies, they mapped out a five-year economic program to decontrol the country's long-stifled economy. First step: to decontrol the peso itself. Recognizing that he could not risk freeing the peso without enough dollars in hand to meet any run on the banks, Macapagal last month sent a six-man mission under Finance Minister Fernando Sison to the U.S.
Last week the Philippine Supreme Court ruled 9 to 1 that Macapagal could oust Garcia's man from the bank governorship and install his own. Simultaneously, members of Sison's mission returned to Manila with good news: in their search for U.S. dollars they had not met a single refusal. In hand: $166 million in private bank loans; $121 million from the International Monetary Fund and various U.S. agencies. In all, Macapagal can begin his reform administration with a sizable backlog of about $400 million. He plans to ease import-export controls, continue some tariffs in a way that will encourage agriculture, discourage luxury imports.
The feverishly busy first weeks almost convinced the tao that Macapagal might eventually solve the nation's problems of corruption, unemployment, poverty. He seemed to be everywhere—at political conferences, on the waterfront to inspect goods confiscated by customs guards, wielding a billiard cue in the government press office, or in the chamber of the Philippine Congress, both of whose houses are dominated by the Nacionalista opposition. In his 72-minute State of the Nation address last week, Macapagal said, "It's wasted effort to steep the young in virtue and morality only to let them realize as they grow up that their elders are neither moral nor virtuous." He ended in an appeal, "to set aside—partisanship," and, with tears, told the legislators: "We have been elected under different parties, but we have been elected by the same people."