🇵🇭Philippine Peso (PHP)

The peso descends from the Spanish silver coin that circulated across the colonial Pacific, and the Philippines has used the name continuously since. The first banknotes were issued in 1852 by El Banco Español Filipino de Isabel II, the institution that became the Bank of the Philippine Islands and is among the oldest banks in Southeast Asia. Central banking arrived later: the Central Bank of the Philippines opened in 1949 and was replaced in 1993 by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas under the New Central Bank Act, which gave it a narrower mandate centred on price stability.

More than most currencies, the peso is shaped by money sent home. Remittances from Filipinos working abroad are one of the country's largest sources of foreign currency, and they arrive in a pattern rather than a stream, rising before Christmas and before the school year. That is why conversions into the peso far outnumber conversions out of it, and why the currency can firm at predictable points in the calendar. The Bangko Sentral runs a floating rate and intervenes only to smooth disorderly moves, so the peso otherwise follows trade flows, oil prices and US interest rates.

The peso is the sole legal tender of the Philippines; foreign currency is exchanged at banks and licensed money changers rather than spent directly.