Nadaleen Singh

Ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion (UTC) Ian Chi­napoo is con­fi­dent that T&T can weath­er any fall out from the Fed­er­al shut­down in the Unit­ed States.Speak­ing just two days ahead of an Oc­to­ber 17 dead­line for the debt ceil­ing to be raised be­fore the US Trea­sury runs out of mon­ey and be­gin de­fault­ing on its oblig­a­tions, Chi­napoo's con­fi­dence was in con­trast to the alarm raised by In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund chief Chris­tine La­garde who warned that the sit­u­a­tion could tip the world in­to re­ces­sion.

Chi­napoo told the T&T Guardian: "We are a small open econ­o­my and we are all try­ing to cre­ate val­ue. I think many of our in­vest­ment hous­es are savvy. We have in­ter­na­tion­al con­nec­tions and we would have been tak­ing good ad­vice from our in­ter­na­tion­al ad­vi­sors go­ing for­ward."I can't speak to any one in­vest­ment house but giv­en the peo­ple I sit across the ta­ble with in the in­dus­try, I would be very hard-pressed to be­lieve they wouldn't take the same type of risk pro­tec­tion ac­tion to pre­serve their in­vestor's funds."

Chi­napoo is pre­dict­ing a mid­night end to the Fed­er­al shut­down.

"The US dol­lar is the glob­al re­serve cur­ren­cy and the US pa­per is the glob­al re­serve as­set, so that's what she (La­garde) is re­al­ly re­fer­ring to, if the US has a prob­lem and there­fore, it's debt be­comes im­paired. If you look at the hold­ings of many coun­tries, they would have US pa­per in their port­fo­lio, I think the US gov­ern­ment is very aware of that and, as hap­pened the last time–we might see a mid­night yield come to fruition, be­cause we all know it is about the health­care is­sue and less so about the ac­tu­al debt is­sue."

Chi­napoo ad­vised, how­ev­er, that whether or not the US gov­ern­ment comes to a res­o­lu­tion, T&T must be pre­pared. Chi­napoo said the UTC has been mon­i­tor­ing the de­vel­op­ments around the shut­down."We are ac­tu­al­ly look­ing for the op­por­tu­ni­ties in this sit­u­a­tion be­cause dur­ing this time you would have cer­tain in­vest­ments that would go down in val­ue (and), if the sit­u­a­tion re­solves, would go up in val­ue.

"We are mon­i­tor­ing the be­hav­iour in the mar­ket. We have great ad­vi­sors as well, who we work with in the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket. Our in­vest­ment com­mit­tee has al­ready ap­proved our ac­tions on dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios so, on Sce­nario A we have a plan, sce­nario B we have a plan."On the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets yes­ter­day, com­modi­ties prices were most­ly high­er as traders keep a close eye on the talks in Wash­ing­ton aimed at avoid­ing a U.S. gov­ern­ment de­fault.

Gold and sil­ver inched up. Many traders ex­pect pre­cious met­als prices to jump if a deal isn't reached and in­vestors park their mon­ey in safe-haven as­sets.De­cem­ber gold rose $8.40 to $1,276.60 an ounce Mon­day. Sil­ver for De­cem­ber de­liv­ery rose 9.5 cents to $21.354 an ounce.En­er­gy prices were mixed. Oil has been fluc­tu­at­ing as hopes build and then di­min­ish for a deal to ex­tend the U.S. gov­ern­ment's bor­row­ing au­thor­i­ty and to end a par­tial shut­down of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.