ARTA expects Marcos to sign EO to hasten building of telco towers

The Anti-Red Tape Authority said it hopes President Ferdinand Marcos Jr will sign an executive order that will fasttrack applications for the building of telco towers.

A Joint Memorandum Circular was approved by the previous administration during the COVID-19 pandemic but it is set to expire this September.

ARTA Director General Secretary Ernesto Perez said it is important to institutionalize a faster application process to build and energize telco towers.

“I am very confident that with the support of the private sector, we will see the President signing [this order] because we have already submitted the final draft,” Perez said.

The joint memorandum circular with different government agencies reduced requirements for tower infrastructures from 30 permits to 8.

It also reduced the documentary requirements from 86 to 35.

This cut turnaround time from 241 working days to just 60 working days.

Perez also encouraged the private sector to report LGUs who fail to deliver within the prescribed period.

“When it is difficult to deal with the government because there is red tape, there is corruption,” Perez said.

ARTA held a press briefing and workshop on the matter at Globe Telecom Tower in Taguig City Friday morning.

BSP chief cites importance of interest rate differential with US

Ensuring adequate interest rate differential between the Philippines and the US will help put market uncertainties at bay, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Felipe Medalla said.

In an interview over CNBC on Friday, Medalla said the current 1.25 percent difference between the BSP’s overnight reverse repurchase (RRP) rate and the Federal Reserve’s 5-5.25 percent key rate is what “the market seems to think that its appropriate differential between our policy rate and the US policy rate.”

When asked how long will the BSP can hold its key rates steady after the policy-making Monetary Board (MB) on Thursday maintained the central bank’s rates, Medalla said that “if inflation were purely a domestic issue, the pause will probably be no longer than two or three meetings.”

“But what we’ll have to be very vigilant about is the extent to which a small differential between our policy rate and the Fed’s could cause significant weakening of the peso, which may actually become the new anchor of inflationary expectations,” he said.

Thus, Medalla said that any developments overseas that will affect domestic rate of price increases and result to second round effects are factors that the BSP will definitely consider vis-avis its policy stance.

“It’s prudent to pause (but) at the same time it doesn’t make sense to raise because, as already pointed out, if you look at the month-on-month inflation that’s actually quite low already. In fact, it’s slightly negative,” he said.

The MB’s decision on Thursday to pause the central bank’s rate hiking cycle, which started in May 2022 and has resulted to the 425 basis points increase in the key rates, is the first time that the BSP did not mirror the Fed’s move, which is a rate hike earlier this month, after noting the deceleration in domestic inflation rate.

After hitting its 14-year high of 8.7 percent last January, domestic rate of price increases has slowed and registered a 6.6 percent annual rate last April.

Monetary officials forecast monthly inflation rate to return to within the 2-4 percent target band of the government in the last quarter of the year.