Nadaleen Singh

As Gov­ern­ment pre­pares to em­bark on road shows in the Unit­ed States to sell US$1 bil­lion in bonds to fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions there, lo­cal bankers are call­ing for con­tin­ued mon­i­tor­ing of in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets. This fol­lows Britain's vote to leave the Eu­ro­pean Union which caused glob­al stock mar­kets to plum­met and oil prices to slide down­ward.

Pres­i­dent of the Bankers As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T, (BATT) Dar­ryl White said trends show that in­vestors move to oth­er mar­kets when it's not pros­per­ous in a par­tic­u­lar mar­ket.

Speak­ing at the launch of Bank­ing Week at the ban­quet room of the Queens' Park Crick­et Club in Port-of-Spain, White said if Gov­ern­ment goes ahead with the bond "we will see how that af­fects the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets."

He said: "If one looked at the US Trea­sury which is the bench­mark for is­su­ing US debt, US trea­suries have dropped and stayed pret­ty low.

"I have not looked at trea­suries over the last week­end since Brex­it. Most of the times when you have those types of re­ac­tions, peo­ple tend to go to­ward stronger glob­al cur­ren­cies. The US is a stronger glob­al cur­ren­cy.

White said it might "ac­tu­al­ly be more at­trac­tive to go in­to US trea­suries" be­cause bench­mark trea­suries have stayed "pret­ty de­cent."

"I haven't seen any­thing that sug­gests that it is a bad time, but we'll see. Mar­kets are al­ways volatile, made worse by re­cent events."

He said if asked lo­cal T&T's bankers are will­ing to ac­com­pa­ny the con­tin­gent go­ing to the US for the road show.

On a re­lat­ed is­sue, White said: "I am not sure which bank is go­ing to be ar­rang­ing the fi­nanc­ing just yet. Should it be one of our lo­cal banks its pos­si­ble. I am sure he (Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert) would be ably as­sist­ed by the Cen­tral Bank and mem­bers of the Gi­nance Min­istry."