The Caribbean rum in­dus­try is cur­rent­ly nav­i­gat­ing a pe­ri­od of ad­just­ment as pro­duc­ers con­tend with post-pan­dem­ic eco­nom­ic chal­lenges, evolv­ing trade con­di­tions, and un­even de­mand across key in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets.

Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Lar­ry Howai has stressed that T&T “can­not wait any longer” to mod­ernise its pay­ment sys­tem, as he opened the launch of a pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on the long-an­tic­i­pat­ed Draft Pay­ment Sys­tems and Ser­vices Bill and Reg­u­la­tions aimed at strength­en­ing fi­nan­cial sta­bil­i­ty, en­cour­ag­ing in­no­va­tion, and ex­pand­ing dig­i­tal pay­ments.

Nathan Dur­gans­ingh was just 17 years old when he found a niche mar­ket with­in his cir­cle of friends; clean­ing their shoes for a small fee. At 24, he is the own­er of a small busi­ness that out­grew its space at his San­ta Cruz home and had to be re­lo­cat­ed to a larg­er space in St Au­gus­tine.

Gaso­line prices in­creased across most Cari­com mar­kets be­tween Ju­ly 2025 and May 2026, al­though the av­er­age rise across the re­gion was small­er than the in­crease in the glob­al av­er­age price.

There has been a great deal of com­men­tary about Moody’s with­draw­al of its rat­ing from the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go. That com­men­tary and con­tro­ver­sy was in­evitable. NGC is not an or­di­nary com­pa­ny. It sits at the cen­tre of the coun­try’s gas econ­o­my, the petro­chem­i­cal es­tate, the LNG chain and, by ex­ten­sion, the fis­cal for­tunes of the coun­try. When a rat­ing agency with­draws from such an in­sti­tu­tion, the mat­ter can­not be treat­ed as a rou­tine ad­min­is­tra­tive oc­cur­rence.

Last Thurs­day, May 14, the rat­ing agency Moody’s is­sued a news re­lease, known as a rat­ing ac­tion, an­nounc­ing that it had with­drawn its cred­it rat­ing for the whol­ly state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (NGC) due to in­suf­fi­cient in­for­ma­tion. Moody’s with­drew NGC’s Ba2 cor­po­rate fam­i­ly rat­ing, ba2 base­line cred­it as­sess­ment and Ba2 se­nior un­se­cured notes.

For just over two weeks, the Caribbean be­came the back­drop for one of the biggest cre­ator-dri­ven in­ter­net events of 2026.

Every pro­fes­sion—en­gi­neer­ing, med­i­cine, law, ac­count­ing, ar­chi­tec­ture—rests on a shared foun­da­tion of com­pe­tence, dili­gence and ethics. This foun­da­tion is ex­pressed through the stan­dard of care, some­times called the du­ty of care.

In­ter­est in en­er­gy sec­tor ser­vice providers based in T&T has risen sig­nif­i­cant­ly due to re­newed ac­tiv­i­ty in Venezuela’s nat­ur­al gas fields as well as the con­tin­ued de­vel­op­ment of en­er­gy in­dus­tries in Guyana and Suri­name.

Months af­ter one of the coun­try’s news­pa­pers closed its doors, an­oth­er has in­formed staff that it is re­trench­ing em­ploy­ees.

Bar­ba­dos is deep­en­ing dis­cus­sions with Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) over route de­vel­op­ment and re­gion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty at a time when the ma­jor­i­ty Trinidad and To­ba­go-owned car­ri­er re­mains un­der pres­sure over prof­itabil­i­ty, op­er­a­tional per­for­mance, and its long-de­layed au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments.

In the com­pa­ny's unau­dit­ed in­ter­im fi­nan­cial state­ments for the quar­ter end­ed March 31, 2026, the com­pa­ny re­port­ed to­tal com­pre­hen­sive in­come of $10.88 mil­lion, an im­prove­ment over the $9.5 mil­lion record­ed for the same pe­ri­od in 2025.