Here’s what President Bongbong Marcos said about the current state of the peso against the dollar.
President Bongbong Marcos said the PH government is not planning to exhaust its foreign exchange reserves to defend the Philippine peso.
Based on the latest, the USD to PHP exchange rate has hit its new low, sinking deeper into the 60-to-the-dollar range.
The IBON Foundation warned that the peso’s record-low performance, combined with soaring global oil prices, has created a “double blow” that could cause inflation to double in the coming months—placing the heaviest burden on millions of low-income Filipino families.
President Bongbong Marcos acknowledged that the government has tools to cushion the PH peso’s decline, but only to a certain extent. According to him, spending too much of the country’s reserves to boost the currency would not be effective.
“I think it would be even futile to try to spend all our foreign reserves on defending the peso,” Marcos told Bloomberg and added, “We also recognize that there’s only so much you can do because the dollar’s going to move the way it does.”
The Philippine peso on Monday settled at PHP 60.30 per one US dollar, which is its weakest in history. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said the country’s gross international reserves climbed to $112.5 billion as of the end of January 2026.
Marcos added that it would be difficult to grow the economy by 8 percent in 2028, the year his term as president would end.
He said, “With the war in the Middle East, those have to be redrawn — everything has to be redrawn. The impact of the war is really on middle-income and lower-middle-income countries.”
Still, he remains positive about the country’s future, pointing to investments, a young workforce, and growth in industries like semiconductors and digital infrastructure as key drivers.
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