Have you ever heard of the term “Fed Speak?” This re­lates to the lan­guage used by the US Fed­er­al Re­serve in com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the fi­nan­cial mar­kets and there is an en­tire field of analy­sis that goes in­to de­ci­pher­ing what is meant by what is said.

When the chair­man of the US Fed­er­al Re­serve us­es the words “pa­tient”, “da­ta de­pen­dent” or “tran­si­to­ry,” mar­ket an­a­lysts and tele­vi­sion guests spends hours try­ing to de­ter­mine what those words ac­tu­al­ly mean in the con­text of the eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion at the time of the an­nounce­ments. One word in or out of a sen­tence, one change of em­pha­sis, makes a world of dif­fer­ence.

Just as there is “Fed Speak,” there is “IMF Speak.” There is an art to read­ing IMF Ar­ti­cle IV con­sul­ta­tion doc­u­ments, and many peo­ple who com­ment on these re­ports are seem­ing­ly obliv­i­ous to the “IMF Speak”.

Con­text is im­por­tant. The IMF is a cred­i­tor in­sti­tu­tion that main­tains work­ing re­la­tion­ships with every gov­ern­ment they en­gage with. It can­not af­ford to trig­ger the mar­ket pan­ic that plain speak­ing might cause, nor can it alien­ate a mem­ber coun­try so thor­ough­ly that it los­es ac­cess to the fa­cil­i­ties that it needs.

Lan­guage if not care­ful­ly craft­ed be­comes a self-ful­fill­ing proph­esy. As a re­sult, the diplo­mat­ic di­alect of these re­ports is that they are tech­ni­cal­ly pre­cise, de­lib­er­ate­ly lay­ered, and cal­i­brat­ed so that the same doc­u­ment can be read as re­as­sur­ing by a fi­nance min­is­ter, but it may al­so cause a bond trad­er to pause and take note.

As with “Fed speak,” the choice of words is nev­er ca­su­al, and the ab­sence of a word mat­ters as much as its pres­ence. The IMF has very spe­cif­ic but nu­anced lan­guage and rather than try to ex­plain in the­o­ry lets look at some ac­tu­al ex­am­ples.

“Sub­dued” does not mean slow; it means the econ­o­my is un­der­per­form­ing its po­ten­tial and staff are not con­fi­dent about the near term. “Ad­e­quate” ap­plied to re­serves is a warn­ing that the num­ber pass­es the min­i­mum thresh­old but the trend is un­com­fort­able. “Mod­er­ate­ly weak­er than fun­da­men­tals” on an ex­ter­nal po­si­tion is a sig­nif­i­cant neg­a­tive ver­dict dressed in the lan­guage of a tech­ni­cal find­ing.

Sen­tence con­struc­tion is equal­ly re­veal­ing. Doc­u­ments tend to lead with the pos­i­tive be­fore in­tro­duc­ing the con­cern. A sen­tence that be­gins “While growth has been sup­port­ed by non-en­er­gy sec­tors...” is not a com­pli­ment. What­ev­er fol­lows “while” or “al­though” or “de­spite” is what the staff ac­tu­al­ly wants the read­er to fo­cus on. The open­ing clause is the nec­es­sary diplo­ma­cy. Fur­ther if there is one sec­tion of any con­sul­ta­tion doc­u­ment that should be read with the diplo­mat­ic fil­ter re­moved, it is the risk as­sess­ment, where con­cerns can be framed as pos­si­bil­i­ties rather than crit­i­cisms and the lan­guage, as a re­sult, be­comes no­tice­ably more di­rect. Most of the time in T&T we don’t go past the open­ing para­graphs.

Now let’s ex­plore in the re­main­ing space avail­able what the IMF po­si­tioned in their re­cent­ly con­clud­ed con­sul­ta­tion. There is a lot to un­pack and I may need to fol­low this up with an­oth­er col­umn.

The da­ta

The IMF’s base­line is pre­sent­ed in terms that sound or­der­ly. The econ­o­my grew by an es­ti­mat­ed 0.8 per cent in 2025, dri­ven by non-en­er­gy sec­tors. Growth is pro­ject­ed to ease fur­ther to 0.7 per cent in 2026 as en­er­gy out­put de­clines. Then we can look for­ward to a re­cov­ery. The pro­jec­tion is for 2.9 per cent in 2027 and 3.5 per cent in 2028, as new en­er­gy projects, most no­tably the Man­a­tee gas field op­er­at­ed by Shell comes on­stream. In­fla­tion will hov­er around 2.0 per cent. The cur­rent ac­count will re­main in sur­plus, av­er­ag­ing around 4.0 per cent of GDP over the medi­um term.

A cou­ple points to note. The cur­rent ac­count in sur­plus means that the coun­try is earn­ing more for­eign ex­change than it is spend­ing. Al­so rec­og­nize that the IMF is point­ing to our own gas field, Man­a­tee, rather than gas from the Drag­on field as the en­gine of the growth fore­cast. This is at odds with what you may have been told else­where in the years pri­or.

Now let’s dis­cuss the re­port in plain Eng­lish. Growth de­scribed as “sub­dued” for two con­sec­u­tive years, is fol­lowed by a re­cov­ery pro­ject­ed to ar­rive pre­cise­ly when a sin­gle off­shore project is ex­pect­ed to be­gin pro­duc­tion. At this poin,t this isn’t a fore­cast built on broad eco­nom­ic mo­men­tum. It is a bet on one vari­able, a nat­ur­al gas field com­ing on stream. Every cit­i­zen will take that po­ten­tial op­por­tu­ni­ty, but if we don’t di­men­sion it prop­er­ly then we end up with the com­plan­cen­cy that has plagued us in the past.

Risks de­scribed as “tilt­ed to the down­side in the near term” means the staff be­lieve things will more like­ly dis­ap­point than sur­prise on the up­side over the next two years. The find­ing that the cur­rent ac­count is “mod­er­ate­ly weak­er than fun­da­men­tals” is the IMF telling us, that some­thing has gone ma­te­ri­al­ly wrong with T&T’s ex­ter­nal po­si­tion in a short pe­ri­od of time.

That last point de­serves par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion, be­cause the com­par­i­son with the pre­vi­ous con­sul­ta­tion is where the re­al sig­nal sits. In the 2024 con­sul­ta­tion, which as­sessed 2023, T&T’s ex­ter­nal po­si­tion was as­sessed as “stronger than fun­da­men­tals”, with the cur­rent ac­count sur­plus run­ning well above mod­el con­sis­tent norms. The shift to “mod­er­ate­ly weak­er” in Feb­ru­ary 2026 is not a rou­tine word­ing vari­a­tion. It re­flects a ma­te­r­i­al de­te­ri­o­ra­tion over bare­ly two years, and it co­in­cides with a cur­rent ac­count sur­plus that col­lapsed from ap­prox­i­mate­ly 11 per cent of GDP in 2021 to 2.5 per cent in 2023.

While not a like-for-like com­par­i­son, da­ta from the Min­istry of Fi­nance shows that the cal­en­dar 2024 sur­plus fell to US$1.233 bil­lion from US$2.949 bil­lion in 2023, a de­cline of more than half in a sin­gle year. By Q1 2025, the sur­plus had nar­rowed by a fur­ther 21.1 per cent year on year to US$484.3 mil­lion.

GDP Il­lu­sion

A com­mon mis­read­ing of T&T’s eco­nom­ic po­si­tion is to look at the en­er­gy sec­tor de­cline and con­clude that a con­tract­ing en­er­gy sec­tor can be off­set by a suf­fi­cient­ly dy­nam­ic non-en­er­gy econ­o­my. This is the eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion ar­gu­ment. Di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion is nec­es­sary but there is a long, long way to go be­fore it makes any mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence.

En­er­gy sec­tor re­al val­ue added is pro­ject­ed to con­tract by 4.5 per cent in 2026, while non-en­er­gy grows at 2.6 per cent. Since the non-en­er­gy sec­tor con­sti­tutes ap­prox­i­mate­ly 80 per cent of nom­i­nal GDP, one might ex­pect head­line growth to re­main com­fort­ably pos­i­tive. In­stead, it rounds to 0.7 per cent.

The rea­son for this mis­match is struc­tur­al and fre­quent­ly un­der­ap­pre­ci­at­ed. En­er­gy’s macro foot­print ex­tends far be­yond its GDP share be­cause it func­tions si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly as the econ­o­my’s pri­ma­ry earn­er of for­eign ex­change, its dom­i­nant source of fis­cal rev­enue, and the feed­stock sup­pli­er for the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal in­dus­tries, in­clud­ing am­mo­nia, methanol and urea, that an­chor a sub­stan­tial por­tion of what ap­pears in the na­tion­al ac­counts as non-en­er­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing. When up­stream gas out­put falls, it does not mere­ly sub­tract from one slice of the eco­nom­ic pie; it erodes the struc­tur­al foun­da­tion on which the en­tire econ­o­my rests.

The Min­istry of En­er­gy’s con­sol­i­dat­ed bul­letins for Jan­u­ary through March 2025 quan­ti­fy how ex­posed that foun­da­tion al­ready is. Nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion av­er­aged ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2.485 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (bcf/d)in the first quar­ter, de­clin­ing from 2.619 bcf/d in Jan­u­ary to 2.344 bcf/d by March. LNG alone ab­sorbs be­tween over 40 trend­ing to 50 per cent of that out­put, mean­ing that rel­a­tive­ly mod­est up­stream dis­rup­tions trans­late al­most im­me­di­ate­ly in­to un­der­utilised trains at At­lantic LNG, lost ex­port tonnes and re­duced for­eign ex­change re­ceipts.

The Man­a­tee field, is the sin­gle most im­por­tant vari­able in the IMF’s medi­um term sce­nario. Shell has an­nounced a tar­get­ed start of pro­duc­tion in 2027 and a peak out­put of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 604 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day. Against the first quar­ter 2025 av­er­age of rough­ly 2.485 bcf/d, Man­a­tee’s peak pro­duc­tion rep­re­sents ap­prox­i­mate­ly 24 per cent of cur­rent na­tion­al out­put. That is enough, if de­liv­ered, to ma­te­ri­al­ly im­prove down­stream util­i­sa­tion across At­lantic LNG and the petro­chem­i­cal com­plex and to re­store mean­ing­ful cur­rent ac­count and fis­cal head­room.

The IMF’s pro­ject­ed step change from 0.7 per cent growth in 2026 to 2.9 per cent in 2027 and 3.5 per cent in 2028 is the macro­eco­nom­ic ex­pres­sion of this project com­ing on­steam. Note that I am not dis­count­ing the many in­cre­men­tal projects that are cur­rent­ly in play. For ex­am­ple, the Cypre gas project from bpTT is pro­vid­ing in­cre­men­tal sup­ply but there is al­so a de­ple­tion rate to fac­tor in for ex­ist­ing fields. Man­a­tee fits in­to trans­for­ma­tive rather than in­cre­men­tal.

The base­line point is that there is cur­rent­ly a path out of our cur­rent eco­nom­ic chal­lenges, but it is one that has to be de­vel­oped fur­ther if it is to lead to a sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery. There is hope, but there is al­so much work to be done.

Ian Nar­ine is a fi­nan­cial con­sul­tant who is mul­ti­lin­gual in cor­po­rate and busi­ness lan­guages. Please send your com­ments to ian@ian­nar­ine.com