Amando Maglalang Tetangco Jr., chairman of SM Investments Corp., is more prominently known as the third governor of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).
Born Nov. 14, 1952, he has the rare distinction of having served as BSP governor for two consecutive six-year terms under two Philippine presidents — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Benigno Aquino III.
He was a distinguished career central banker for more than four decades, beginning March 25, 1974.
In April 2021, he was elected vice chairman and independent director of SM Prime.
At present, he sits as a director of Manila Hotel and Toyota Motor Philippines, and is a trustee of St. Luke’s Medical Center, the Tan Yan Kee Foundation and the Foundation for Liberty and Prosperity. He is also a member of the international advisory board of the Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, Japan, and the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Simply put, he has a dizzying list of executive portfolios both in the Philippines and abroad.
He was the country’s representative to the ASEAN Central Bank Forum; the Executives’ Meeting of East Asia and Pacific Central Banks; the South East Asia Central Banks; the South East Asia, New Zealand and Australia; and the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies.
He was governor for the Philippines at the International Monetary Fund and the alternate governor at the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. At the Bank for International Settlements, he was chair of the Meeting of Small Open Economies.
Tetangco was also an independent director of Converge ICT Solutions Inc., Shell Pilipinas Corp., Belle Corp. and CIBI Information Inc.
He chaired various international committees, notably the BIS Asian Consultative Council; the Financial Stability Board Regional Consultative Group for Asia; and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion Steering Committee.
Tetangco graduated top of his class from Ateneo de Manila University with an AB Economics degree and completed his Master’s in Public Policy and Administration (Development Economics) from the University of Wisconsin in the United States as a BSP scholar.
As a financial manager, Tetangco believed that having so much money on hand has its own setbacks.
In a speech, he expressed his conviction that “the rationale espoused by the US Federal Reserve is that making money so cheap would force more businesses to borrow, and hopefully use these funds to expand operations, hire more people and encourage growth-inducing consumption.”
He recalled that by 2011, dollars “merrily flowed into the Philippines, partly encouraged by the government’s promise to spend the funds for a massive infrastructure build-up.”
“But the Philippine economy was not structurally ready to absorb all these inflows,” Tetangco noted. “Since these funds were not being used productively, they could be inflationary, and we don’t want that,” he added.
According to him, the BSP worried about the inflationary impact of having too much money in the local economy — sending prices of goods and services on a tailspin with the poor being the most vulnerable.
To correct the imbalance, the BSP under Tetangco’s watch set in motion the special deposit account (SDA) that was widely received by the banks. By 2013, it had mustered P2 trillion, equivalent to roughly 20 percent of the Philippine economy as a whole.
He warned, however, that even a utopian economy should be handled with extreme caution. “Shall we continue to live in this Goldilocks world — where everything seems to be just right — where the porridge is not too hot or too cold … where the bed is neither too hard nor too soft … where the chair is not too big or not too small?”
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