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President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (REUTERS)

MANILA, Philippines — President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. on Thursday called for the resumption of negotiations for a bilateral free trade agreement between the Philippines and the European Union (EU).

Marcos said that with the “conducive business atmosphere” that the Philippines is fostering, the timing and conditions are “quite right” to solidify trade relations between the Philippines and the EU through a free trade agreement.

“A bilateral free trade agreement will be a win-win strategy for both the Philippines and the EU. It promises to achieve mutually beneficial economic goals while maintaining consistency with the EU’s core ideals of sustainable development and environment protection as well as with EU’s Indo-Pacific Strategy,” he said in his speech at the U-ASEAN Business Council (EU-ABC) annual general meeting gala dinner.

“Hence, I take this opportunity to call upon our friends from the EU ABC and the ECCP (European Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines) to actively advocate for the resumption of negotiations for this purpose as well as to strive for fair treatment and more beneficial reciprocity,” Marcos added.

He said the EU-ABC and the ECCP, which he described as “credible voices of the Europen business community,” can help move negotiations toward a “favorable conclusion.”

“If and when that happens, it could very well be the capstone of all efforts to strength PH-EU relations over the course of the next decades,” the President said.

Marcos said his administration aims to create an “enabling environment” that will help achieve the tangible socio-economic goals for the people.

With this, he said his administration started implemented strategies which include broadening the range of liberalized businesses and sectors to include public services, retail trade, and renewables, as well as making the system of corporate taxation more business-friendly, with a lowered tax rate and improved mechanism for tax and duties incentives.

The government will also establish express or “green” lanes to integrate and streamline permitting and approval processes, and remove unnecessary barriers and redundancies.

Marcos said these will enhance the Philippines’ potential as an attractive trade and investment destination, which will also bode well for a stronger and more productive relationship between the Philippines and the EU.

This solid enabling environment, he said, will also pave the way for the country’s compliance with vital international obligations as determined by the EU, and guarantee the Philippines’ continued participation in the Generalized System of Preferences Plus (GSP+) scheme.

The President touted how the Philippines has been showing “healthy signs” of recovery from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a 7.6% gross domestic product growth in 2022.

This, he said, signifies highly resilient economic progress in the country.

He also said that his administration has rolled out the Philippine Development Plan for 2023-2028.

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None of them would ever admit it but European leaders will be breathing a sigh of relief now that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been re-elected .

The defeated candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu promised to turn Turkey back towards the West, if he ousted the old autocrat.

But there are few prime ministers or presidents who would be ecstatic at the prospect of welcoming Ankara back into the fold after two decades of Erdogan .

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban did not even wait for the official result before congratulating Mr Erdogan on an “unquestionable election victory”. Only Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani was quicker off the mark.

But Mr Orban, who has plenty of enemies of his own in Brussels, sees Mr Erdogan as an ally and role model.

Other European leaders were conspicuously slower, and are considerably less admiring of the Turkish president . The ambivalence is mutual.

There’s no question that Mr Erdogan has made himself a nuisance in Nato. He infuriated Alliance members by blocking Sweden from joining the Alliance over Stockholm’s supposed support for dissident Kurds.

Patience with Mr Erdogan was already strained after Turkey invaded Syria, which hurt relations with Washington and European capitals. Joe Biden has wanted Mr Erdogan gone for quite some time.

In 2019, the then-presidential candidate said the US should support the Turkish opposition “to take on and defeat Erdogan”. During this hard fought campaign, Mr Erdogan accused Washington of meddling in the elections.

Unlike most Nato members, Turkey has refused to hit Russia with Western-style sanctions for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. But it was the distasteful Mr Erdogan who struck a deal with Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to allow Ukraine to ship grain from its Black Sea ports.

No one else on the world stage can claim such a success, which makes Mr Erdogan a valuable mediator if and when the time comes to talk peace.

Mr Kilicdaroglu, who pledged to turn away from Russia if elected, could never match the president’s pull with Putin. Mr Erdogan dramatically increased the powers of the presidency after a failed coup against him in 2016.

Mr Kilicdaroglu pledged to reverse those reforms and return to a parliamentary democracy and rule of law far closer to Western European norms. But his plans to revive Turkey’s long-stalled accession process to the EU, would have been greeted with barely disguised horror in Fortress Europe.

Even simple visa liberalisation has proved elusive in a bloc where even mainstream politicians wade into the culture war over the “islamisation” of Europe’s “Judeo-Christian” culture.

EU diplomats suggested that Mr Kilicdaroglu would have soon found out Ankara was likely to get a very cool welcome.

Mr Erdogan has long since given up on Turkey joining the EU, having had his fingers burnt in the past when trying to revitalise an application first made in 1987.

That suits Brussels and its member states just fine. The European Union talks a good game about democratic values and human rights. But it had no problem paying Mr Erdogan huge sums to host Syrian refugees during the 2015 migrant crisis.

Turkey also agreed to take back migrants making illegal crossings of the Mediterranean in exchange for more cash.

Mr Erdogan may be impossible to like. But has made himself very useful.

China has banned the US microchip company Micron from the country’s infrastructure projects, calling it a national security risk as it retaliates against the Biden administration’s semiconductor restrictions .

The announcement from China’s cyberspace administration comes amid a growing tech war between the two superpowers and as fears mount that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could cripple the global electronics industry .

China on Sunday said Micron, which is the biggest US maker of memory chips, posed “serious network security risks” as it banned the technology.

The US said the restrictions “have no basis in fact.”

Shares in Micron fell by 6pc on Monday morning.

The US has made a series of moves to restrict China’s access to the most advanced microchip technology under both the Trump and Biden administrations. It has also banned the use of Chinese technology manufactured by ZTE and Huawei, citing national security risks, and put pressure on Western allies to enact similar bans.

The action against Micron is the first time China has directly retaliated against a US company. Beijing is seen as dependent on US technology, which has until now restricted its ability to respond.

Analysts said China was able to withstand a crackdown on Micron because the two other major memory manufacturers, Samsung and Hynix, are both based in South Korea.

Seoul said it was willing to allow its domestic manufacturers to ramp up exports to China in the wake of the Micron ban. Both Samsung and SK Hynix, with global operations, will make a judgment on this,” Jang Young-jin, South Korea’s vice-minister of trade, said on Monday.

Ben Barringer, a research analyst at investment firm Quilter Cheviot, said: “The companies may now need to navigate what could be politically treacherous waters.”

Washington has already restricted the export of US technology needed to manufacture advanced microchips to China.

Microchips have become an increasingly political issue in recent years as a ready supply of the most advanced technology is seen as crucial for economic advancement and military dominance.

Western officials are increasingly concerned about the threat of China invading Taiwan, which is the microchip manufacturing centre of the world.

Taiwan, which China’s president Xi Jinping has vowed to reunite with the mainland, is a hub for advanced chip production. It is feared that China becoming self-sufficient in semiconductors could make it easier for China to invade the island.

The US and Europe are investing tens of billions in setting up advanced domestic semiconductor manufacturing, in an attempt to shore up supplies.

The Cyberspace Administration of China said: “The review found that Micron’s products have serious network security risks, which pose significant security risks to China’s critical information infrastructure supply chain, affecting China’s national security.”

Responding to the news on Monday, Micron’s chief financial officer said it could affect a “high single digit percentage of total company revenue” in the worst-case scenario. A spokesman said: “We look forward to continuing to engage in discussions with Chinese authorities.”

Last week, Rishi Sunak unveiled plans to boost Britain’s semiconductor industry with a £1bn strategy focused on design and advanced “compound” semiconductors. However, the UK will not follow the EU and US in heavily subsidising domestic production.

When the bond markets dramatically turned on the UK in the wake of the disastrous mini-Budget last autumn, it prompted lengthy lectures on the crazy excesses of “Trussonomics”.

Wild and risky “unfunded tax cuts” were to blame. Lower rates for the rich would widen inequality. The mad dash for growth, which led to a disregard for fiscal caution, was tantamount to a full-scale assault on the anti-growth coalition.

But hold on.

This week we learned that a boring risk premium is every bit as worrying as the “moron risk premium” (as one City analyst famously dubbed the market ructions of last September).

With borrowing costs rising to the highest level in the G7 , and the UK’s creditworthiness again under threat, one point is surely clear.

Britain’s reckoning with the bond markets has been a long time coming – and whoever is in charge can no longer fool themselves into believing that “free” money can be magicked out of nowhere forever.

The past week has been every bit as brutal for the UK gilt market as the drama of last September.

In the wake of another set of dismal inflation figures, which suggested rising prices are becoming as deeply embedded into the British economy as they were in the 1970s, investors moved decisively to sell off UK government debt.

Yields on 10-year bonds soared to 4.31pc, overtaking even Italy, and hitting the highest levels since last autumn.

As market expectations for the interest rate set by the Bank of England rose, so too did mortgage rates . It surely can’t be long before we see cracks in the financial system and, possibly, with wearying familiarity, emergency intervention from the Bank.

It is beginning to look like the sell-off last year was the early stages of something far bigger – and far more worrying.

The bond markets no longer want to finance the profligacy of the British state and our determination to live way beyond our means, at least not without a high fee in return.

Britain is increasingly becoming a poor country that acts like a rich one.

Rishi Sunak convinced the public – and possibly himself – that the Government simply needed to push through some unpopular tax rises, make some “tough choices” on spending, and let the “grown-ups” from the Treasury set policy.

Once that was achieved, so the logic followed, this period of economic turbulence would finally come to an end. But it was always a fiction.

The UK’s finances are unsustainable. The most recent Budget left departments’ spending totals mostly unchanged, with extra money for defence and childcare, but no meaningful cuts until after the next general election.

As the latest set of borrowing figures revealed, we are still a long way from balancing the books.

After a big jump in 2020, government debt as a proportion of GDP remains close to 100pc. Since the economy is looking incapable of growth, that is only going to go up, even if we don’t commit to borrowing more.

Our central bank has lost control of inflation , as evidenced by the rise, not fall, in core inflation in April.

Even the headline rate remains stubbornly high, at 8.7pc, with food prices alarmingly sticky.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said earlier on Friday he would be comfortable with a recession if it brought inflation down. This is the terrible choice the Government has left itself with: persistent inflation or an economic contraction.

Unless we kick our addiction to low growth and debt, the situation will only worsen.

The Treasury’s forecast that it will raise £17bn through higher rates of corporation tax will likely prove as inaccurate as many of its other predictions.

It will only take a handful of private businesses to relocate overseas for the sums to fall far short of what is expected.

Our marginal income tax rates, meanwhile, are now hitting an exorbitant 70pc for many couples with both children and student loans, once tapered allowances and child benefits are taken into account.

Perhaps worst of all, a looming Labour government would spend much more, with seemingly no idea how it is going to pay for it all.

Labour has big plans for a green energy giant, for an interventionist industrial policy, not to mention pay rises for some of its public sector trade union backers.

Yet apart from its plans to tax wealthy foreigners and slap VAT on school fees, it is hard to discern how it plans to pay for it . Against that backdrop, why would anyone want to own gilts with a negative real yield of minus 4pc?

This could be far worse than the crisis we faced last September. For all its flaws in terms of communications and execution, at least the Truss government was borrowing money to finance growth and reform.

The Sunak administration is borrowing to pay for stagnation, and Labour will be borrowing to pay for a massive expansion of the state.

The only genuine way out of this mess is to get the economy growing again.

This is not impossible. We could rip up planning restrictions to start building homes. We could finally diverge from EU regulations. And we could lower taxes on business and entrepreneurs to reboot investment, with personal tax cuts to follow from the proceeds.

Instead, we have chosen to carry on living in a magic money tree fantasyland dressed up as fiscal responsibility.

The bond markets appear to have twigged that the UK is stuck with zero growth, with sustained inflation, and has lost the will to reform itself. So long as this remains the case, they will keep demanding a higher and higher price to lend us money.

The sell-off in gilts last September was just the start: the British debt crisis is going to get a lot rougher in the future.