As he of­ten does when he ad­dress­es the coun­try on mat­ters re­lat­ed to the econ­o­my, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert was up­beat in his as­sess­ment of T&T’s cur­rent po­si­tion.

“The coun­try is in good hands,” he de­clared in his re­sponse to a ques­tion asked at yes­ter­day’s COVID-19 me­dia brief­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter Im­bert, Stan­dard and Poor’s has giv­en T&T a sta­ble rat­ing and the oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al­ly recog­nised rat­ing agency, Moody’s, is cur­rent­ly do­ing its as­sess­ment of the coun­try. Min­is­ter Im­bert is con­fi­dent that the Gov­ern­ment has the flex­i­bil­i­ty to ad­just mon­e­tary pol­i­cy in re­sponse to ex­ter­nal shocks.

That is in­deed an op­ti­mistic por­tray­al of what lies ahead for T&T but it is not sur­pris­ing that the min­is­ter would put that type of spin on what lies ahead. The clear­er pic­ture of how this coun­try is man­ag­ing the eco­nom­ic shock of COVID-19 is still months away and with all that is un­known about the virus, it is just too ear­ly to de­clare ei­ther suc­cess or de­feat.

This na­tion may yet be in for a sober­ing dose of re­al­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly as Stan­dard and Poor’s cur­rent as­sign­ment to T&T of a BBB- with sta­ble out­look - does not rule out the prospect of a down­grade in the fu­ture which will have a big im­pact on the coun­try’s bor­row­ing costs.

This is the back­drop against which the Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ex­pen­di­ture of $934 mil­lion so far on var­i­ous COVID-19 re­lief mea­sures, must be viewed. Ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter Im­bert, a fur­ther $250 mil­lion will be made avail­able if need­ed.

To be fair, the de­ci­sions to ex­tend re­lief ini­tia­tives to soft­en the blow of the pan­dem­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly for dis­placed work­ers and seg­ments of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, were a good first step in the right di­rec­tion. How­ev­er, im­ple­men­ta­tion has been spot­ty at best and still has not reached many house­holds that have been sent reel­ing by the pan­dem­ic.

A harsh re­al­i­ty that can­not be ig­nored is that the lev­els of hunger and pover­ty across the coun­try have in­creased sig­nif­i­cant­ly in just the last six weeks.

Even if Mr Im­bert is amenable to a fur­ther loos­en­ing of the purse strings—and there isn’t much ca­pac­i­ty for that any­way—T&T is dan­ger­ous­ly close to break­ing point with the cur­rent pan­dem­ic re­stric­tions. It sim­ply isn’t fea­si­ble to con­tin­ue with a sit­u­a­tion where so much of the coun­try’s man­u­fac­tur­ing and com­mer­cial ac­tiv­i­ty re­mains in a state of lock­down.

If this sup­pres­sion of ac­tiv­i­ty in so many of T&T’s pro­duc­tive sec­tors drags out for much longer, the eco­nom­ic fall­out may be of such a mag­ni­tude that the pain of the oil price shock of a few years ago will pale in com­par­i­son. If that hap­pens, a rat­ing down­grade may be the least of our wor­ries.

As reck­less as it might be to quick­ly jump back to pre-COVID lev­els of ac­tiv­i­ty, too slow and cau­tious an ap­proach could be even more dan­ger­ous.

It is time for a se­ri­ous re­think of the T&T’s re­open­ing strat­e­gy.