The na­tion's top banker has warned in­vestors to be wary of in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties that of­fer re­turns that seem too good to be true, and he pro­vid­ed the first hint that fraud may have caused the high pro­file col­lapse of Cli­co, Hin­du Cred­it Union and Cli­co In­vest­ment Bank.

"If there is one thing the HCU, Cli­co and CIB sit­u­a­tions have in com­mon, is that if it is too good to be true, it is, and may prob­a­bly be fraud­u­lent," says Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor, Ewart Williams. "Any in­sti­tu­tion that of­fers you in­ter­est rates that are way out of line with the mar­ket, is more than like­ly tak­ing you for a ride," he added. Speak­ing at the close of a Fi­nan­cial Lit­er­a­cy Course for school­teach­ers and lec­tur­ers at the Cen­tral Bank con­fer­ence fa­cil­i­ty yes­ter­day, Williams said the on­go­ing fi­nan­cial cri­sis at home and abroad, has bought home to many coun­tries, the crit­i­cal im­por­tance of ear­ly ed­u­ca­tion in fi­nance.

"There is a grow­ing con­sen­sus among pol­i­cy-mak­ers (and ed­u­ca­tors) that a coun­try's lack of fi­nan­cial so­phis­ti­ca­tion was one ma­jor cause of the cur­rent eco­nom­ic prob­lems. "In the US for ex­am­ple, pol­i­cy-mak­ers point to the fact that the eco­nom­ic re­ces­sion found too many house­holds buried in debt, stuck with un­af­ford­able mort­gages with far too lit­tle sav­ings and stung by huge in­vest­ment loss­es" added Williams. "In Trinidad and To­ba­go, while we at the Cen­tral Bank were al­ways con­vinced of the ben­e­fits of fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy to our peo­ple and to our na­tion­al as­pi­ra­tions, the se­vere eco­nom­ic slow­down with which we are now con­front­ed, as well as the re­cent chal­lenges in our fi­nan­cial sec­tor, have un­der­scored the need to ramp up the fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy pro­gramme � in fact to make it more of a cru­sade."

He said cur­rent eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances have forced fam­i­lies to make ends meet, to plan and bud­get their in­comes, and gen­er­al­ly to make dif­fi­cult con­sumer choic­es � a sit­u­a­tion for which many peo­ple are not pre­pared. "While the Na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Lit­er­a­cy Pro­gramme (NFLP) con­tin­ues to work with adults to shift how they think about per­son­al fi­nance and to help change their habits, the ben­e­fits of work­ing with young peo­ple in their schools are over­whelm­ing." He said the ra­tio­nal is sim­ple � catch them ear­ly to change their path go­ing in­to adult­hood. We need to start from ear­ly to help our chil­dren un­der­stand the re­la­tion­ship be­tween risk and re­turn.

"Our schools should teach our chil­dren the ba­sics of debt and cred­it and the im­pli­ca­tions of hav­ing bad cred­it. "Teach­ing these con­cepts in school will save our chil­dren con­sid­er­able hard­ships in adult­hood," he added. Last year the NFLP con­duct­ed cours­es in 488 pri­ma­ry schools cov­er­ing 27,860 stu­dents, as well as con­duct­ed pi­lot cours­es with 930 stu­dents in sev­en sec­ondary schools.