Trinidad and To­ba­go is fac­ing a sober­ing eco­nom­ic re­al­i­ty. While our for­eign ex­change re­serves have been steadi­ly shrink­ing, our food im­port bill has been climb­ing re­lent­less­ly. And yet, our pop­u­la­tion has re­mained vir­tu­al­ly flat for more than a decade.

Busi­ness and gov­ern­ment lead­ers must utilise risk man­age­ment prin­ci­ples when con­fronting the chal­lenges of the con­tem­po­rary world such as lack of forex, the need to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my or the geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions be­tween Venezuela and T&T.

The Gov­ern­ment’s Vir­tu­al As­sets and Vir­tu­al As­set Ser­vice Providers Bill, 2025, pro­pos­es to ban the pur­chase, sale, ex­change or trans­fer of cryp­tocur­ren­cies (which in­clude Bit­coin and Ethereum) un­til De­cem­ber 31, 2027 and is al­so seek­ing to im­pose fines of up to $5 mil­lion for any­one “en­gag­ing in unau­tho­rised vir­tu­al as­set ac­tiv­i­ties.”

Guardian Hold­ings Ltd (GHL) yes­ter­day an­nounced the suc­cess­ful ex­e­cu­tion of its TT$1.02 bil­lion bond re­fi­nanc­ing trans­ac­tion on Sep­tem­ber 9, 2025, well in ad­vance of the orig­i­nal ma­tu­ri­ty date of De­cem­ber 11, 2025.

An­gos­tu­ra will con­tin­ue to ex­pand de­spite po­ten­tial geopo­lit­i­cal chal­lenges, chair­man Gary Hunt has said.

For­mer Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Dr Alvin Hi­laire has ini­ti­at­ed le­gal pro­ceed­ings against the State, chal­leng­ing what he de­scribes as his un­law­ful and un­con­sti­tu­tion­al ter­mi­na­tion from of­fice.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce (TTCIC) has moved to clar­i­fy re­ports sur­round­ing a hack­ing in­ci­dent that oc­curred dur­ing one of its on­line events yes­ter­day. The Cham­ber con­firmed that the breach oc­curred on its Zoom plat­form dur­ing a we­bi­nar ses­sion yes­ter­day, but em­pha­sised that the mat­ter was swift­ly con­tained and did not com­pro­mise its wider sys­tems.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) has a strat­e­gy to in­crease the coun­try’s non-en­er­gy ex­ports by 71 per cent by 2030.

The glob­al eco­nom­ic land­scape is cur­rent­ly de­fined by a high de­gree of un­cer­tain­ty, which is caus­ing a rip­ple ef­fect across in­dus­tries, in­clud­ing in­sur­ance. This un­cer­tain­ty may not just be a pass­ing phase, it can have a “crip­pling” ef­fect which can lead to paral­y­sis for busi­ness­es, con­sumers and clients alike and per­haps cause them to pause on in­vest­ment and ma­jor fi­nan­cial de­ci­sions.

High Court Judge Kevin Ram­cha­ran will have to re­con­sid­er his de­ci­sion to ap­prove the sig­nif­i­cant fees claimed by the joint liq­uida­tors of CL Fi­nan­cial (CLF) for the work they did in 2019. 

The auc­tion for deep­wa­ter ex­plo­ration blocks in T&T has yield­ed un­der­whelm­ing re­sults, with for­eign in­vestor in­ter­est falling short of ex­pec­ta­tions.

The im­me­di­ate ad­den­dum to last week’s col­umn is that Ja­maica’s net for­eign re­serves is high­er than that of Trinidad and To­ba­go. Let that re­al­i­ty sink in for a mo­ment. The same Ja­maica that is sup­posed to be un­der the IMF “bo­gey man” ac­tu­al­ly has more for­eign cur­ren­cy re­serves (ex­clud­ing our Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund) than T&T and this is so even when you fac­tor in some lev­el of ar­ti­fi­cial de­mand in Ja­maica com­ing as a re­sult of the for­eign ex­change poli­cies in T&T.