Multi-media giant NET25 has shown the range of its opinion page on a single posting day, October 27, 2026, with NET25 President Caesar R. Vallejos writing in Taglish on the peso’s record low and veteran television producer Wilma Galvante writing in English on Regine Velasquez’s farewell to her signature songs.
For the Filipino household, the two subjects sit closer than they look. The family that checks the exchange rate before buying rice grew up with Regine’s songs on the radio, and the page serves the reader’s wallet and the collective music memory alike.
Vallejos wrote “Free Fallin’ ang Piso” on the morning the peso touched Php 64 to the dollar, the third record low in a week. He grants the reasons the experts give, the war in the Middle East, expensive oil and a hawkish US Federal Reserve, but does not stop there.
The column notes that the Bangko Sentral raised its policy rate by 50 basis points on October 22 and that the peso fell anyway five days later, with Chinabank’s Domini Velasquez and Philippine Institute for Development Studies’ John Paolo Rivera both saying that higher rates alone cannot rescue the currency.
Vallejos then asks who takes the hit: the jeepney driver, whose take-home pay is about half of what it was in January; the mother at the palengke, with September inflation at 7.2 percent, the fastest since March 2023; and the OFW family, whose gain on the exchange rate is eaten by rice, fares and electricity.
The column rejects conservation as a plan, recalling that Filipinos were told to tighten their belts during Ondoy, Yolanda and the pandemic, and asks, eight months after the Strait of Hormuz closed, where the plan is for alternative oil supply and for food that is not chained to the dollar.
The portal’s news desk carried the follow-through as well: the Department of Agriculture’s warning on October 29 that rice and other imported farm products will cost more because of the weak peso, and the national debt’s record Php 19.66 trillion in September, reported on November 1 with the weak peso among the reasons.
Galvante’s “REGINE”, posted the same day, is a different column altogether. Written a week after Regine Velasquez’s three-night Finale concert, at which the singer retired the signature songs that her voice today, in Galvante’s words, “may no longer do justice to”, it goes back to 1984, when Galvante was producing Ang Bagong Kampeon at RPN 9.
A timid girl named Chona Velasquez kept coming to the studio with her father, Mang Gerry. Rather than let her face a champion on an eight-week winning streak, Galvante asked the two to wait a week. Chona then won eight straight weeks herself and the grand prize, her last amateur contest.
Galvante followed the singer’s career to GMA, where she gave her television shows and a drama series, and was thanked from a concert stage years later as Regine’s “second mom”. Mang Gerry, who maintained that it always rained when Regine sang outdoors, as it did on the Millennium Day broadcast, gets the column’s warmest, almost bittersweet passages.
The network makes a conscious effort to grow its opinion page from its own ranks and to let each columnist write in the language the subject calls for, which is what gives the roster its range. This makes the Voices & Columns section relatable to the household and not only to the policy watcher.
As always, the columns are free to read anytime, anywhere on the NET25.com portal, and Vallejos can also be seen on the network’s business program “Open for Business” as well.
NET25’s commitment to the Filipino reader continues through an opinion page that follows the peso to the palengke and the song to the stage. The “alternative mainstream” media giant keeps its columns open to the wallet and the memory alike, so that the Filipino household finds both on one page.
