Near­ly ten years ago, for­mer Cen­tral Bank gov­er­nor Jwala Ram­baran sound­ed the alarm bell with re­spect to for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty.

He did so in de­liv­er­ing the third Mon­e­tary Pol­i­cy Fo­rum ad­dress to the Ch­agua­nas Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce on De­cem­ber 1, 2014.

At the time, Mr Ram­baran de­scribed the avail­abil­i­ty of for­eign ex­change as “a murky mat­ter” and re­ferred to “every­one’s needs for pre­cious US cur­ren­cy be­ing un­ful­filled, from the va­ca­tion­er want­i­ng US$500, to you, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, be­ing un­able to pay for goods, and see­ing your cred­it stand­ing be­ing af­fect­ed.”

Turn­ing to those gath­ered at the me­dia ta­ble, Ram­baran al­so said he was sure that when busi­ness re­porters wrote the 2014 Year In Re­view, “they will prob­a­bly say the so-called ‘for­eign ex­change short­age’ is the busi­ness sto­ry of the year, and per­haps it is.”

Ram­baran was clear­ly in­di­cat­ing that in that year, there had been a great deal of dis­qui­et in the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty about ac­cess to for­eign ex­change to pay their bills.

There is sig­nif­i­cant irony in that speech to the Ch­agua­nas Cham­ber be­cause on De­cem­ber 4, 2015, al­most ex­act­ly a year lat­er, in a speech to the Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants’ As­so­ci­a­tion, Mr Ram­baran iden­ti­fied by name the com­pa­nies he said were among the largest users of for­eign ex­change in T&T, as well as the five sec­tors that were the largest users.

For re­veal­ing the names of com­pa­nies that had ac­cess to the most for­eign ex­change, Mr Ram­baran’s ser­vice as the coun­try’s Cen­tral Bank gov­er­nor was ter­mi­nat­ed three weeks lat­er.

The irony is that ten years af­ter his speech at the Hy­att, there are again peo­ple in this coun­try who want the Cen­tral Bank, in the in­ter­est of pub­lic trans­paren­cy, to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion about who is get­ting the for­eign ex­change and on what ba­sis.

While cur­rent Gov­er­nor Dr Alvin Hi­laire is un­like­ly to be as in­ju­di­cious as his im­me­di­ate pre­de­ces­sor, there is clear­ly need for both the Cen­tral Bank and the Min­istry of Fi­nance to bring im­me­di­ate clar­i­ty to the is­sues of the for­eign ex­change regime, ac­cess and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

In a sense, the for­eign ex­change prob­lems T&T is fac­ing are like cli­mate change—it is sim­ple-mind­ed in the ex­treme to think that if noth­ing is done, some­how the prob­lem will re­solve it­self.

Like cli­mate change, T&T’s for­eign ex­change prob­lems re­quire clear analy­sis of both the caus­es and con­se­quences of the prob­lem; there needs to be a thought­ful cost/ben­e­fit analy­sis of the var­i­ous op­tions, to be pre­ced­ed by wide­spread but dis­crete con­sul­ta­tion, and fol­lowed by de­ci­sive ac­tion and con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

For more than ten years, the T&T pop­u­la­tion’s de­mand for for­eign ex­change has far ex­ceed­ed sup­ply, most­ly from the en­er­gy sec­tor with the au­tho­rised deal­ers as in­ter­me­di­aries, at the cur­rent ex­change rate.

There is an arrange­ment for the deficit be­tween the de­mand and sup­ply of for­eign ex­change to be ad­dressed by the Cen­tral Bank, which sells about US$1.2 bil­lion to the au­tho­rised deal­ers on an an­nu­al ba­sis. That sum comes from the Gov­ern­ment’s col­lec­tion of tax­es from the do­mes­tic en­er­gy sec­tor. Spend­ing US$1.2 bil­lion to sup­port the for­eign ex­change de­mands of the T&T pop­u­la­tion is not sus­tain­able.

There­fore, it be­hoves Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert and Gov­er­nor Hi­laire to act now to bring an end to this con­stant and con­tin­u­ing wor­ry about for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty.