Pe­ter Bal­roop

?Na­tions of the world are be­ing ad­vised to stop peg­ging their cur­ren­cies to the US dol­lar.

The ad­vice came yes­ter­day from Rahul Ba­jaj, a lead­ing In­di­an in­dus­tri­al­ist who sits on the board of the New York Stock Ex­change and is al­so on the board of the Har­vard School of Busi­ness. Ba­jaj, who is al­so a di­rec­tor on the Com­mon­wealth Busi­ness Coun­cil, was how­ev­er, un­able to pin­point a cur­ren­cy which could re­place the US dol­lar, al­though he did men­tion the Ger­man mark as be­ing in the run­ning. But Ba­jaj said sev­er­ing ties with the US dol­lar was not an "im­me­di­ate so­lu­tion," but one the world should look care­ful­ly at. The G 20 coun­tries were mov­ing in that di­rec­tion, and as re­cent­ly as No­vem­ber 7 when their fi­nance min­is­ters met in Lon­don that was the di­rec­tion that they were con­sid­er­ing, Ba­jaj warned.

His com­ments came dur­ing a ses­sion of the busi­ness fo­rum in Port-of-Spain that is a fore­run­ner to this week­end's Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing (CHOGM). The ses­sion en­ti­tled New Glob­al Fi­nan­cial Struc­ture: In­stru­ments of Growth was held aboard the cruise lin­er Ser­e­nade of the Seas in the Port-of-Spain har­bour and at­tend­ed by scores of lead­ing econ­o­mists and busi­ness per­son­al­i­ties from the Com­mon­wealth. It was chaired by Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board and Unit Trust ex­ec­u­tive, Ruben Mc­Sween and oth­er top-flight pan­el­lists, in­clud­ing Prof Comp­ton Bourne who is head of the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank; Pas­cal Dozie, chair­man of the Di­a­mond Group of Nige­ria and Srini­vas Strid­har who is chair­man of a State-owned bank in In­dia that has US$35 bil­lion in as­sets at 3,500 branch­es.

Ba­jaj, who is an In­di­an MP and chair­man of the Ba­jaj Au­to Group, the lead­ing two and three-wheel ve­hi­cle man­u­fac­tur­er in In­dia, point­ed to the con­tin­ued de­pre­ci­a­tion of the US dol­lar as well as the tril­lions of dol­lars in debt that is bog­ging down that coun­try as two rea­sons for sev­er­ing the peg­ging tie. Ba­jaj was de­scribed as the "doyen" of In­di­an in­dus­try by Strid­har and his out­spo­ken as­sess­ment of the fate of the US dol­lar was echoed by Bourne, a for­mer UWI, St Au­gus­tine, prin­ci­pal who is an emer­i­tus eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor.