@re-joyce 5 April 2026

If you weren’t following the news or paying bills back between 2010 and 2016, it’s hard to imagine just how tense the global economy felt. We’re talking about the Noynoy Aquino era, a time when the world was still healing from the massive 2008 financial crash and oil prices were absolutely haywire. For a good chunk of that time, global crude oil was sitting at over $100 a barrel. Prices that today have sent local fuel prices skyhigh now possibly reaching ₱150 per liter of diesel. Yet, somehow, the daily grind in the Philippines back then didn't feel as chaotic as the global charts suggested. The trick was that the PNoy admin acted like a massive financial shock absorber. Because the Philippine oil industry was already deregulated back then, the government can't just dictate prices by law. Instead, they used a "trigger" system for taxes. That is, whenever global prices hit a certain scary threshold, the government would automatically slash import duties on oil, sometimes bringing them down to 0%. Essentially, the government chose to lose out on billions in tax collections just to make sure the landed cost of fuel stayed low enough for companies to keep pump prices steady. This was really about stopping a brutal domino effect before it even started. In our economy, fuel isn't just for cars. It’s the lifeblood of our food and transport. To protect the most vulnerable, they launched the Pantawid Pasada Program, giving fuel cards directly to jeepney and tricycle drivers. The goal was surgical. If you subsidize the driver, you prevent a fare hike. If you prevent a fare hike, you keep the price of vegetables and rice from soaring. It was a targeted way to keep inflation in check without trying to control the entire market. Beyond the subsidies, there was a lot of policing by the Department of Energy. They would constantly compare local price hikes against regional benchmarks in Singapore. If the Big Three oil companies tried to get greedy, the admin would call them out in the media or threaten investigations. It was a mix of hard data and public pressure that forced oil players to be a lot more careful about how much, and how fast, they raised their prices. They even started pushing harder for biofuels and renewable energy, trying to slowly decouple our economy from the whims of the Middle East. It was a strategy built on the idea that the less we relied on imported oil, the more we could actually control our own destiny. In the end, nothing about that era changed the global price of oil. What changed was how much of that pain actually reached the everyday Filipino. That’s the difference between policy on paper and policy that people feel. Because crises are inevitable. But whether they become chaos or just another challenge we get through depends entirely on who’s steering.