Richard Lord

Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Mar­i­ano Browne says there is no for­eign ex­change cri­sis in T&T. The min­is­ter said this while re­spond­ing to a mo­tion on the ad­journ­ment brought by Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark.

Mark, in pre­sent­ing the mo­tion in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, said he want­ed to know what the for­eign ex­change sit­u­a­tion was as it re­lat­ed to months of im­port cov­er and why busi­ness­men were be­ing called up­on to line up to ac­cess for­eign ex­change. "There is am­ple ev­i­dence that we would be able to meet all our re­quire­ments. There may come a pe­ri­od when we will have to sell some more out of our re­serves to be able to make good the trade re­quire­ments in the mar­ket­place and those would be seen as short blips in sup­ply but our for­eign ex­change cov­er and our im­port cov­er re­main buoy­ant," he said. Browne said at the last pub­lished date in May 2009 the to­tal in­ter­na­tion­al re­serves held by the Cen­tral Bank was US$8.9 bil­lion. He said that fig­ure in­creased to US$10.2 bil­lion when the re­serves held by com­mer­cial banks in T&T were in­clud­ed.

He ad­mit­ted that there had been a slip­page of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $1 bil­lion. The re­serves held by the com­mer­cial banks were down by ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$300 mil­lion and that held by the Cen­tral Bank is al­so down some­what, he said. He main­tained that the cur­rent re­serves would al­low for 11 months im­port cov­er. Browne said last year was a bumper year for trade. But, this year he said: "The lev­el of im­ports has fall­en, so the av­er­age val­ue of im­ports for 2009 is low­er than that for 2008." He said, "When one looks at the sum­ma­ry bal­ance of trade and the sum­ma­ry bal­ance of pay­ments po­si­tion, T&T is in net sur­plus. We are earn­ing more than we are spend­ing." Browne ad­mit­ted there ex­ist­ed a greater de­mand for for­eign ex­change at this time but, in­sist­ed if there were any sort of short­age in the for­eign ex­change re­quire­ment T&T would have seen the emer­gence of a black mar­ket rate or al­ter­na­tive­ly a wide dis­par­i­ty in the amount that was quot­ed (dai­ly ex­change rate).

Browne stressed the world was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a fi­nance crunch and many in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness­es did not en­joy the same lev­el of bank­ing sup­port as they would have had pre­vi­ous­ly. "That will trans­late as a change in the terms of trade," Browne, who is al­so Trade Min­is­ter, told leg­is­la­tors.

He added that while pre­vi­ous­ly a busi­ness­man would have been giv­en 90 or 30 days cred­it, now the for­eign sup­pli­er was ask­ing to be paid ear­li­er. "That has led to some tight­en­ing in the for­eign ex­change mar­ket," he said. Browne al­so said there was no wage or salary freeze in T&T as was be­ing claimed by Mark.

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Dur­ing the de­bate Mark called on the Gov­ern­ment to scrap the Tarou­ba Sta­di­um project, which in­cludes the Bri­an Lara Sta­di­um. He said the project was a white ele­phant and should be aban­doned be­cause of the ex­ces­sive cost over­runs