Nadaleen Singh

T&T is one step clos­er to deal­ing with liq­uid­i­ty, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar told mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty on Fri­day.She said the coun­try is now ca­pa­ble of rais­ing funds in the lo­cal mar­ket rather than look­ing for fund­ing in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.

"There is so much ex­cess liq­uid­i­ty here that our cit­i­zens can put their mon­ey in­to the fund, so that we can use the fund­ing here and give a high­er re­turn to lo­cal cit­i­zens on­ly," Per­sad-Bisses­sar said in the fea­ture ad­dress at the lun­cheon dur­ing the third Pre­An­nu­al Meet­ing of the Gov­er­nors of the In­ter-amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB), Caribbean Coun­try De­part­ment, at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain.

Lat­er, in an in­ter­view, Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Jwala Ram­bar­ran said high liq­uid­i­ty was en­gag­ing his at­ten­tion and groups have been set up to look at ways to al­le­vi­ate the prob­lem.He said the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the set­ting up of a fund to sat­is­fy the needs of the wider com­mu­ni­ty is be­ing con­sid­ered."The Prime Min­is­ter is quite right to point to the sit­u­a­tion of ex­cess liq­uid­i­ty, it is an is­sue that we are ad­dress­ing right now at the Cen­tral Bank through the cap­i­tal mar­kets de­vel­op­ment ini­tia­tive that we have un­der­way," Ram­bar­ran said.

"We ac­tu­al­ly have the pri­vate sec­tor, bank en­ti­ties like NIB and UTC, look­ing at how we might be able to struc­ture a fund or pos­si­bly two funds to ad­dress na­tion­al in­fra­struc­ture de­vel­op­ment needs."Ram­bar­ran said through the cap­i­tal mar­kets ini­tia­tive the Cen­tral Bank has four groups look­ing at liq­uid­i­ty.Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai said a pos­si­ble op­tion is for the pub­lic or pri­vate sec­tor to use the funds, while at the same time it would give in­vestors a bet­ter in­ter­est.

"We have not re­al­ly de­vel­oped all the mech­a­nisms around that. In terms of the idea the Prime Min­is­ter had to de­vel­op it for old­er peo­ple, for ex­am­ple, pro­vide them with bonds and so on, the is­sue with the bonds for old­er peo­ple is that con­sid­er­a­tion should be giv­en on whether there are any le­gal re­stric­tions."

Howai said dis­cus­sion are on­go­ing: "The Cen­tral Bank had set up sev­er­al com­mit­tees to deal with it (liq­uid­i­ty) and they have been in dis­cus­sions, they have been do­ing that for a num­ber of months and have been look­ing at a num­ber of op­tions."