In­ter­na­tion­al rat­ings agency, Moody’s, has con­firmed Trinidad and To­ba­go’s cred­it rat­ing at Ba1, ac­cord­ing to a news re­lease from the Min­istry of Fi­nance.

In the re­lease, the Min­istry ob­serves that this rat­ing is “one of the high­est in the Caribbean re­gion”.

Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert ob­serves that Moody’s has sim­ply changed the out­look to neg­a­tive for T&T, while down­grad­ing a num­ber of oil and gas ex­port­ing coun­tries all over the world.

“Moody’s de­ci­sion to keep the rat­ing of Trinidad and To­ba­go un­changed is a tes­ti­mo­ny to the re­silience of the coun­try, in the face of un­prece­dent­ed shocks”, says Min­is­ter Im­bert. “The COVID-19 cri­sis com­bined with the col­lapse of oil prices have led rat­ing agen­cies to change the rat­ing of a very large num­ber of coun­tries.”

The fi­nance min­istry notes that the coun­try’s shock-ab­sorp­tion ca­pac­i­ty “has been en­hanced by a bold and pro-ac­tive pol­i­cy re­sponse”. It ex­plains that the rat­ing sta­bil­i­ty owes in good part to the track record of the gov­ern­ment, which re­spond­ed to the pre­vi­ous oil shock post 2015 in a way that, ac­cord­ing to Moody’s, ex­ceed­ed its ex­pec­ta­tions.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Im­bert says it is the in­ten­tion of the gov­ern­ment to con­tin­ue to pre­serve what un­der­pins Moody’s cred­it rat­ing.

“We will pre­serve our siz­able fis­cal buffers, low liq­uid­i­ty risk and lim­it­ed ex­ter­nal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties,” he as­serts. “Each of them pro­tect the pop­u­la­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go through­out ex­cep­tion­al­ly ad­verse glob­al cir­cum­stances,” he added.