Another bomb, another scam. Instability is as instability goes; we don’t need to complicate our lives by giving in to greed or stupidity. This assumes that we are aware of our greed or ignorant in the first place. But how can we be not in the aftermath of PIPC and Francswiss?

To the unschooled or the unmoneyed, PIPC and Franc­swiss are the two latest investment models that have collapsed. I withhold judgment until the official word is out. In the meantime, I wrote about the bank scam with the bank manager in the lead defrauding hapless OFWs of their blood, sweat and tears savings. There is another scam brewing in another bank.

Another bank, another scam. Who says our banking system is one of the most highly regulated in the world? It may be true on paper but not if columnists have to write about them for the Central Bank to act. The last time, concerned officials requested me to submit a formal complaint; otherwise they could and would not move. I refused and said that is not the job of a columnist. Whose job is it anyway?

“If it is too good to be true,” that is the first and surest sign that it is a scam. Promising 20 percent annual return these days in an era where lending rates at around 10 percent smacks either of a super-risky business model, a truly dramatic and innovative one or a downright scheme. Place your bets.

Yet there is a bank nearby that offers this kind of a return and to top it off, the monthly interest payouts are made in postdated checks. My little knowledge of banking laws floored me—taking deposits (actually a loan by the depositor to the bank for which the bank pays interest on) and issuing checks to back it up. Sound financial practice it is when depositors do not rely on the bank’s standing and credibility but rather on the fiction of negotiable instruments.

It is greed when investors know the downside and yet decide to go for it because the alternative is very low interest regime and there are no good investment outlets. To start a venture might even be riskier than taking a chance on scams with their high yields. The country continues to struggle to build an enabling business and regulatory environment. The bombings do not help.

Latifa, a housewife and possibly a shrewd depositor, even spreads out her placements in the bank just in case it goes bankrupt. That way, she can recover from the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation (PDIC). Woe to the taxpayer! From a credit risk, or if you please, a moral and vicious risk, it is now transformed to an insurance risk borne by all the depositors in the whole industry. Beat that for ignorant savers. Ignorance and stupidity are not of the same genre. Greed layers and overwhelms.

In a related sense, people like Latifa form part of the scam. They ride in the initial crest of the investments hoping to get the quick returns and pull out before the pyramid collapses, the earlier the better. Next to stock pundits, they watch the “market” closest to spot the latest emerging investment proposal. Or Latifa could be a gambler, putting a betting portion for the winnings.

And so you hear of business people, professionals and politicians victimized many times over. Lessons are never learned contrary to the pervasiveness, frequency and scale of the scams. Maybe someone should write a fable. Alarm bells ring harder when it is the entrepreneurial class that is involved and staggering sums quoted. The worst feature of a scam is that its sucks productive forces and limited resources to monetary magic that goes up in smoke and sparks when the right thing to do is to invest in endeavors that are in the long run developmental.

But I am only a columnist and I can only write about a scam alert.