Four­teen weeks af­ter hav­ing to shut their doors to help stop the spread of COVID-19, lo­cal cin­e­mas are get­ting this ready this week for the show to go on.

I re­ceived some in­ter­est­ing re­spons­es to last week’s ar­ti­cle on hire pur­chase. One read­er not­ed that his par­ents took out the ma­jor­i­ty of their stuff us­ing hire pur­chase. An­oth­er sug­gest­ed that hire pur­chase is pop­u­lar be­cause many banks do not lend the small amounts shown in the ar­ti­cle. He al­so not­ed that sales staff are very ef­fec­tive in en­cour­ag­ing the use of hire pur­chase—they re­spond quick­ly and you do not need an ap­point­ment. They make it easy to buy those ap­pli­ances and fur­ni­ture.

Re­spond­ing to in­creduli­ty sur­round­ing the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance’s growth pro­jec­tions for the T&T econ­o­my, Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance, Allyson West has main­tained that the fore­casts men­tioned by Im­bert in his mid-year re­view are rea­son­able.

NCB Glob­al Fi­nance Lim­it­ed (NCBGF) has been af­firmed with a rat­ing of CariA (For­eign and Lo­cal Cur­ren­cy) on the re­gion­al rat­ing scale, and ttA on the T&T na­tion­al scale to from Caribbean In­for­ma­tion & Cred­it Rat­ing Ser­vices Lim­it­ed (Cari­CRIS).

By the year 2025, the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) has re­vealed that its new­ly launched man­u­fac­tur­ing strat­e­gy would pro­duce 40 large man­u­fac­tur­ers, who should in turn, be ex­port­ing $4bil­lion in val­ue.

The food and bev­er­age sec­tor may be slow­ly re­open­ing but its eco­nom­ic fu­ture looks grim even af­ter Gov­ern­ment’s re­stric­tions are even­tu­al­ly lift­ed post the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

This must be one of the ques­tion that the elec­torate must con­sid­er and for which Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley must tell the coun­try. We have had a five-year pe­ri­od in which the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance has failed to in­spire con­fi­dence in the econ­o­my and presided over five years of con­sec­u­tive de­cline.

As he is­sued an ur­gent call to gov­ern­ments in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean to help the avi­a­tion sec­tor, the Vice Pres­i­dent of the In­ter­na­tion­al Air Trans­port As­so­ci­a­tion (IA­TA), ar­gued that re­gion­al cit­i­zens must learn to live with the nov­el coro­n­avirus.

The In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) has ap­proved a US$50 mil­lion (TT$338 mil­lion) loan to im­prove the liv­ing con­di­tions of low-in­come house­holds and in­vest in ur­ban spaces.

One To­bag­on­ian econ­o­mist has al­leged that the process sur­round­ing the ac­qui­si­tion of Man­ta Lodge and Sanc­tu­ary Vil­las was un­struc­tured, un­sound and was not done to en­hance To­ba­go’s econ­o­my.

The Wright­son Road sky­line is set to un­der­go a sig­nif­i­cant facelift soon as the Pow­er Gen­er­a­tion Com­pa­ny of T&T Lim­it­ed (Pow­er­Gen) has an­nounced plans to de­mol­ish its Port-of-Spain pow­er plant and its icon­ic four tow­ers.

Sco­tia­bank Trinidad and To­ba­go Ltd (The Group) has re­alised in­come af­ter tax­a­tion of $119 mil­lion for the sec­ond quar­ter end­ed April 30, 2020, a de­crease of $39 mil­lion or 25 per cent over the com­par­a­tive quar­ter end­ed April 30, 2019.