Pe­ter Christo­pher

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Re­port­ing from Wash­ing­ton DC

For­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty has been raised as a sig­nif­i­cant is­sue af­fect­ing mem­bers of the In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Group of 24 (G24) at the au­tumn meet­ings of the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) in Wash­ing­ton DC.

Trinidad and To­ba­go, a mem­ber of the G24, has had con­sis­tent strug­gles with for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty with sev­er­al lo­cal banks slash­ing for­eign ex­change spend­ing ceil­ings on cred­it cards for cus­tomers in the past two years.

In the bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion last month, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert an­nounced leg­is­la­tion will be in­tro­duced to prompt en­er­gy sec­tor com­pa­nies to pay all their tax­es in US dol­lars.

Dur­ing a me­dia brief­ing of the In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Group of 24 (G24), on In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Af­fairs and De­vel­op­ment on Tues­day, Nige­ria's Min­is­ter of Fi­nance and Co­or­di­nat­ing Min­is­ter of the Econ­o­my, Wale Edun spoke on the lin­ger­ing con­cern among the mem­ber­ship.

"For­eign ex­change and eq­ui­ty gen­er­al­ly is very dif­fi­cult (for) the coun­tries that are re­form­ing their economies do­mes­ti­cal­ly," he said.

"They do have debt sus­tain­abil­i­ty in terms of debt to GDP. How­ev­er, they have liq­uid­i­ty con­straints, par­tic­u­lar­ly for­eign ex­change with re­la­tion to debt ser­vic­ing of their for­eign debt, but al­so the do­mes­tic debt," Egun said.

Edun said much of the dis­cus­sions cen­tred around how the IMF can help in this re­gard.

"In fact, the IMF is specif­i­cal­ly fo­cussing on how to help with a sort of bridge fi­nanc­ing that takes a coun­try that does have its fun­da­men­tals right, but gives it enough time for that ad­just­ment, and prob­a­bly helps it with height­ened debt ser­vic­ing, which is just for a pe­ri­od," said Edun, who ex­plained that Nige­ria, like Trinidad and To­ba­go, re­ceived much of its for­eign ex­change sup­ply from its oil sec­tor.

"Clear­ly with re­gard to Nige­ria, the key about the for­eign ex­change mar­ket re­al­ly is sup­ply. And, of course, as you know, we have the oil pro­duc­ing coun­try, we just need to get our oil pro­duc­tion so that we can deal with that is­sue of for­eign ex­change," he said, ap­peal­ing to de­vel­oped na­tions, who have seen in­fla­tion rates drop, to help where they can.

Ear­li­er on Tues­day, IMF's deputy di­rec­tor of re­search, Petya Ko­e­va-Brooks ex­plained that the oil and gas in­dus­try con­tin­ued to be af­fect­ed by volatil­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly amid lin­ger­ing con­flicts in the Mid­dle East.

"Fall­out has been the hard­est in the coun­tries in the re­gion, at the epi­cen­ter of the con­flict. We've seen sig­nif­i­cant de­clines in out­put in West Bank and in Gaza. Lebanon has al­so been hard hit now. We've al­so seen im­pact on the econ­o­my in Is­rael, al­though there, I think so far, at least, the im­pact has been small­er. Now, be­yond that, there has al­so been an im­pact on com­mod­i­ty prices, on oil prices. We've seen quite a lot of volatil­i­ty, though, as oth­er fac­tors have al­so come in, such as the con­cerns about glob­al de­mand kind of have pushed prices in the op­po­site di­rec­tion, " said Ko­e­va-Brooks at IMF's Press Brief­ing for the re­lease of the lat­est World Eco­nom­ic Out­look re­port.

She con­tin­ued, "Now, be­yond that, when it comes to spe­cif­ic coun­tries in the GCC re­gion, when it comes to, for in­stance, Sau­di Ara­bia, we've seen there that the non-oil out­put has done very well, and we do have a small down­ward re­vi­sion in the over­all growth rate but that is pret­ty much be­cause of the vol­un­tary oil cuts that have now been ex­tend­ed through No­vem­ber."

The re­port not­ed that while oil prices are ex­pect­ed to in­crease, nat­ur­al gas prices are pro­ject­ed to de­cline in 2025.