Lead­ing busi­ness­man, Pe­ter George Jr. is urg­ing Gov­ern­ment to move even quick­er with im­ple­ment­ing many of the pro­posed mea­sures to steer the coun­try through the cur­rent COVID-19 cri­sis.

In a state­ment is­sued to­day, Mr George Jr. says re­lief must be pro­vid­ed more ef­fi­cient­ly to cit­i­zens in des­per­ate need, and he al­so rec­om­mends the adop­tion of ag­gres­sive and in­no­v­a­tive strate­gies for re­vi­tal­is­ing the econ­o­my post-cri­sis.

He says Gov­ern­ment must move quick­er to avoid an eco­nom­ic cat­a­stro­phe in this coun­try.

The full text of Mr George Jr.’s state­ment, fol­lows…

STATE­MENT BY BUSI­NESS­MAN PE­TER GEORGE JR.

As bad as we may think it is, it could get worse. GORTT [Gov­ern­ment of the Re­pub­lic of Trinidad and To­ba­go] must act with sig­nif­i­cant­ly more speed, vigour and in­no­v­a­tive­ness to ad­dress TT loom­ing eco­nom­ic cri­sis.

First­ly, tar­get­ed cit­i­zen re­lief must be ex­pe­dit­ed far more quick­ly and as a mat­ter of na­tion­al ur­gency, and the scope fur­ther re­viewed to en­sure max­i­mum ef­fec­tive­ness and im­pact.

There must al­so be a con­cert­ed and com­pre­hen­sive plan to keep the na­tion fed, uti­liz­ing every state ap­pa­ra­tus at its dis­pos­al. There are many glob­al ex­am­ples which we can use! I and I’m cer­tain oth­er ma­jor food op­er­a­tors stand ready to as­sist.

Gov­ern­ment seems on the face to be tak­ing a mea­sured ap­proach, con­sis­tent with a con­ven­tion­al eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion as op­posed to the ef­forts seen with most of our in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners! This is a treach­er­ous path fraught with per­il as time is not an al­ly here.

There is a far greater risk of calami­tous eco­nom­ic seizure than is be­ing dis­cussed. Ag­gre­gate de­mand has al­ready con­tract­ed sharply and runs the risk of vir­tu­al col­lapse, and we could po­ten­tial­ly face eco­nom­ic con­trac­tion and un­em­ploy­ment fig­ures both in dou­ble dig­its. This will con­tribute to de­creased fis­cal ca­pac­i­ty, mak­ing eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery more dif­fi­cult, if pos­si­ble at all, and fur­ther ex­ac­er­bate so­cial fall­out and in­sta­bil­i­ty.

Most dan­ger­ous­ly, many busi­ness­es may fold or sig­nif­i­cant­ly con­tract op­er­a­tions, se­vere­ly cur­tail­ing the econ­o­my's ab­sorp­tive ca­pac­i­ty.

As it stands, spend­ing would like­ly take years to get back to the al­ready de­pressed lev­els of 2019. The econ­o­my needs to be shocked back to nor­mal­cy and hope­ful­ly avoid any pro­longed pe­ri­od of eco­nom­ic malaise and more so, un­em­ploy­ment.

GORTT must cre­ative­ly and in­no­v­a­tive­ly uti­lize every sin­gle con­ceiv­able tool at their dis­pos­al (in­clud­ing debt) and un­der­take an his­toric fis­cal in­ter­ven­tion at least equal to the es­ti­mat­ed GDP loss to com­bat this.

The re­sponse must be as swift and ag­gres­sive as the virus' ar­rival. GORTT must ac­cept that it is not just in­di­vid­u­als in the work­force that will need as­sis­tance but al­so busi­ness­es- and must be pre­pared to in­ject am­ple liq­uid­i­ty to en­sure eco­nom­ic con­ti­nu­ity.

Cit­i­zens and busi­ness own­ers large AND small must be as­sured, and quick­ly, that re­lief is forth­com­ing in or­der for them to have the con­fi­dence and com­fort to con­tin­ue ‘loss’ op­er­a­tions. We are not just fac­ing a short term shock from CoV19, but we face the spec­tre of sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic drag from an econ­o­my that was al­ready in sec­u­lar stag­na­tion, threat­en­ing to wipe out all progress made in re­cent years.

We must do every­thing to keep the eco­nom­ic en­gine run­ning! Many busi­ness­es, if not re­as­sured of as­sis­tance, will sim­ply fold up their tents which will be cat­a­stroph­ic to the econ­o­my. The risk of do­ing too much is neg­li­gi­ble where­as the risk of do­ing too lit­tle is calami­tous.

GORTT must se­ri­ous­ly and cre­ative­ly con­sid­er

- Fur­ther ur­gent cash pay­ments di­rect­ly to af­fect­ed cit­i­zens

- Di­rect gov­ern­ment back­stop sup­port to most af­fect­ed sec­tors/busi­ness­es

- State spon­sored, low in­ter­est busi­ness liq­uid­i­ty loans with con­di­tions

- Dras­ti­cal­ly in­creased food se­cu­ri­ty pro­vi­sions

The shut­ter­ing of an econ­o­my is nei­ther mea­sured or or­tho­dox.  The mea­sures we take to restart it al­so can­not be or­tho­dox or mea­sured. We must think BIG if we are to stave off an eco­nom­ic calami­ty and en­sure the con­ti­nu­ity of our econ­o­my and preser­va­tion of our way of life.

This sit­u­a­tion must be tak­en se­ri­ous­ly and treat­ed with a very broad and strong brush now as the risks of un­der­re­ac­tion are im­mea­sur­able.

GORTT wise­ly act­ed vig­or­ous­ly and ag­gres­sive­ly to treat with the virus’ fall­out. Noth­ing less must hap­pen in deal­ing with the eco­nom­ic fall­out.