A modern manger of Bethlehem
It seemed like one of the fictional vignettes in the ancient collection of birth narratives of Matthew or Luke.  But no, this one is from a contemporary chronicler, the International Herald Tribune, and, I have no reason to believe otherwise, in fact true.
The IHT item, meriting page 1 treatment in the December 24 issue, was about a small bank named “Bank of Cattaraugus” in a small town in New York state, population 950, more or less the same as those in Bethlehem.  In today’s mania for “bigness”, a mantra pursued by the likes of Citibank and J.P. Morgan Chase, the Bank of Cattaraugus sounds like a discordant note; a sharp but welcome anomaly, at the very least to the community it services.
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The fallen star of David
He descended like a shooting star, initially seemingly very slowly approaching according to some preordained trajectory, then soon enough gathering speed upon entry into the atmosphere, and finally as it appeared to be touching the mountain peaks, burning out and exiting the evening stage as nothing more than a whiff of smoke in the December sky.
Reynaldo G. David was clearly a shooting  star last December 13 during the Senate Committees’ seventh joint hearing on the allegedly anomalous large scale financial transactions of the Development Bank of the  Philippines as his tenure as the bank’s president drew to a close.   Click for Complete Article
 

Confusion among Ongpin’s minions
They were running like chicken without heads.  Because, I suspect, their head was not around to give them direction and orchestrate their specific spiels.
Roberto V. Ongpin was out of the country, off to celebrate, well-deservedly, his wedding anniversary. Left to fend for themselves were my hapless (and, in my view, helpless) former classmate and then Secretary of Finance, Margarito Teves, former Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) President Reynaldo David, current Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP) President Gilda Pico; and, to their deep consternation, members of the DBP and LBP bureaucracy who were involved in the loan under consideration.
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Cracks in DBP’s defensive wall
November 14 which was when, at the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee’s and Committee on Banks’ joint hearing on Development Bank of the Philippines’ questionable transactions subject of Senate Resolution No. 555 filed by Senator Panfilo Lacson, former DBP President Rey David was left by his erstwhile friend Roberto Ongpin to fend for himself, was not David’s first taste of abandonment.
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