MISLEADING: Philippine peso is Asia’s best currency

Claim: The Philippine peso beat neighboring countries as Asia’s best currency, according to an article by website themostpopularlists.com. It cited American business news agency Bloomberg as its source.

Facebook page Thinking Minds, as well as 7 other pages and 31 Facebook groups, shared the article titled, “Philippine Peso Surprises to Become Asia’s Best Currency” on the social networking platform from October 30 to November 4, 2019. These pages and groups often thanked President Rodrigo Duterte in their captions.

Monitoring tool CrowdTangle estimates the total engagements from these accounts to reach 9,713 interactions as of writing. Claim Check, Facebook’s dashboard monitoring tool that identifies suspicious posts shared across the platform, flagged the link for verification.

Rating: MISLEADING

The facts: The link shared by the Facebook groups and pages in end-October and early November 2019 is an exact copy of a March 2019 Bloomberg article, when the Philippine peso bounced back in February from a 13-year low months prior. The story is, however, already 8 months old and is no longer accurate in the region’s current setting.

In fact, just two months after the March 2019 article was published, Bloomberg also said that the Philippine peso was risking its status as Asia’s best currency if the central bank eases its monetary policy (which it did), and because of other factors such as bond outflows, rising oil prices, and a “seasonally strong dollar.”

In a more recent article published in September 2019, Bloomberg named the Thai baht as Asia’s best-performing currency. They also called the Taiwan dollar as Asia’s hottest currency in an October 2019 article.

There are a lot of factors that affect a nation’s currency. Since the country’s exchange rate policy supports a freely floating exchange rate system where the central bank does not control the rate but rather leaves it to market forces, it changes frequently. This makes it hard to predict its value at any given point in time. – Pauline Macaraeg/Rappler.com

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