THE Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) extraordinary 2024 gold sales and its record profits and dividends remitted to the government provide strong circumstantial grounds to ask whether the central bank was effectively roped into President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and former speaker Martin Romualdez’s plot to steal billions of pesos through kickbacks from flood control projects.

The starting point is the sheer scale and timing of the BSP’s gold disposals. In the first half of 2024, the Philippines emerged as the single biggest central-bank seller of gold in the world, unloading roughly 24.9 to 25 tons and slashing the share of gold in its reserves when most central banks were still net buyers. This was not a minor portfolio tweak but a sharp, contrarian move executed during a period that quickly turned into a powerful gold bull run, with prices setting repeated record highs after the bulk of the BSP’s sales had already gone through.

The central bank defended this as “active management” to lock in gains and rebalance its reserve mix which, on its face, is a technically defensible rationale. But the global context undermines the innocence of the timing: When nearly every other monetary authority in the world was buying gold for insurance and de‑dollarization reasons, the Philippines chose to cash out aggressively, narrowing its stock of hard assets just as geopolitical and financial risks were rising.

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UNDER-REPORTED in our part of the world are the very serious consequences for the entire world, and the Philippines, of a US war against Venezuela. Indeed every day, US President Trump in word and deed is preparing America for war, in position in the Caribbean near Venezuela waters.​

The US aircraft carrier strike group (USS Gerald R. Ford) and more than 10 associated warships have been positioned near Venezuelan waters since last month carrying around 15,000 US personnel, including at least one Marine Expeditionary Unit capable of amphibious land operations. Last week, Trump announced that Venezuelan airspace was closed, a clearest sign of an imminent invasion.

I have devoted my Monday column and this one to post the explanation of this coming tectonic geopolitical development and the views of one European expert on the issue, Yanis Varoufakis.

BARRING a sudden change of heart by US President Donald Trump, the world will soon witness US imperialism’s bullying of a hapless Third World country: Venezuela. The US’ real motive for this blatant aggression is not as Trump claims America’s need to defend itself from the invasion of illegal drugs. Its inarguable purpose is the same as that for invading Iraq in 2023, which threw the Middle East into the chaos we see today.

The US motive is to secure forever its supply of oil, as Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, more than Saudi Arabia or Canada. However, Trump’s move would be another development — after the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — in a volatile mix of global geopolitics that could even lead to global thermonuclear war.

As always, Philippine media’s reportage of this imperialist move has been scant, relying on the US-controlled news agencies, and on hard news bereft of explaining what all this means. Because of this, I am devoting my column to a transcription of a recent speech posted on YouTube by a renowned expert on geopolitics, Yanis Varoufakis, a respected Greek economist and geopolitical analyst. Since 2018, he has been secretary-general of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016.