Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dave Tan­coo’s crit­i­cism of the re­ac­tion by in­di­vid­u­als and groups to the re­cent Stan­dard & Poor’s cred­it rat­ing re­vi­sion of Trinidad and To­ba­go from sta­ble to neg­a­tive as “fear­mon­ger­ing,” can be a rea­son­able com­ment of a fi­nance min­is­ter whose pur­pose is not served by ag­i­tat­ed con­cern for the fu­ture in the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty.

It is ac­knowl­edged that wide­spread pes­simism about the econ­o­my has con­se­quences. One such con­se­quence is the self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy that bleak pre­dic­tions in eco­nom­ic mat­ters can quick­ly turn in­to re­al­i­ty, as cit­i­zens re­strict their as­pi­ra­tions and ac­tions.

More­over, the ex­pec­ta­tion is even more im­pos­ing on a Gov­ern­ment which came in­to of­fice hav­ing spread the be­lief in an elec­tion cam­paign that it had the plans to turn the econ­o­my around. In­side those plans must have been the know-it-all to ex­pand the non-pe­tro­le­um sec­tors to gen­er­ate growth and even­tu­al­ly de­vel­op­ment.

Hav­ing chid­ed those who are neg­a­tive, Min­is­ter Tan­coo put firm­ly on the ta­ble the chal­lenges his Gov­ern­ment faces to lead the trans­for­ma­tion, which S&P had made clear in its state­ment.

“We (S&P) could low­er the rat­ings over the next six to 24 months, if the Gov­ern­ment fails to take time­ly steps to strength­en the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of pub­lic fi­nances, en­sure long term bal­anced eco­nom­ic growth and main­tain the coun­try’s strong ex­ter­nal pro­file,” the in­ter­na­tion­al rat­ing agency said in its out­look.

As he pre­pares to present the 2026 Bud­get next month, Min­is­ter Tan­coo must there­fore be re­al­is­tic and hon­est enough to recog­nise that fail­ure can mean a low­er­ing of the rat­ings, which spells eco­nom­ic dis­as­ter re­al­ly.

Sec­ond­ly, “the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of pub­lic fi­nances,” is now ful­ly recog­nised by the Gov­ern­ment as a re­al chal­lenge and that will not be de­pen­dent on bor­row­ing, and/or draw­ing down on the coun­try’s forex re­serves.

What must al­so be con­sid­ered here, and which would cer­tain­ly not have gone with­out no­tice by the in­ter­na­tion­al rat­ing agency, is the Gov­ern­ment’s shut­ting down of the T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty, which of­fered the pos­si­bil­i­ty of col­lect­ing an out­stand­ing TT$10 bil­lion in tax­es. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, at the lo­cal lev­el, rev­enue from prop­er­ty tax has al­so been aban­doned by the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress-led Gov­ern­ment as a form of pub­lic fi­nanc­ing.

The clear sec­ond chal­lenge iden­ti­fied by Min­is­ter Tan­coo him­self is about achiev­ing “bal­anced eco­nom­ic growth,” mean­ing eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment dri­ven by sec­tors of the econ­o­my not de­pen­dent on the hy­dro­car­bon sec­tor - the lat­ter we know to be a task that has been out­side of all that has been part of the post-In­de­pen­dence his­to­ry of T&T.

The re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, there­fore, that Min­is­ter Tan­coo and the Gov­ern­ment have set for them­selves, will be to present in the na­tion­al bud­get, at a min­i­mum, the out­line of a plan with a set of pro­grammes to achieve the trans­for­ma­tion that the min­is­ter has him­self stat­ed is nec­es­sary to avoid a low­er­ing of the rat­ings by S&P.

One in­ter­est­ing point is the min­is­ter’s ac­knowl­edge­ment of “the coun­try’s strong ex­ter­nal pro­file,” which can be af­fect­ed if he and his Gov­ern­ment do not come good, start­ing with the 2026 Bud­get.

So yes, we agree with Min­is­ter Tan­coo that we should not be un­nec­es­sar­i­ly pes­simistic, but whether it be­comes re­al­i­ty will be de­ter­mined by Gov­ern­ment’s first op­por­tu­ni­ty to show that it has the an­swers it boast­ed of hav­ing in its cam­paign for of­fice.