The Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view has be­come a fix­ture on the fi­nan­cial cal­en­dar of T&T be­cause it al­lows the min­is­ter of fi­nance to pro­vide an up­date on the per­for­mance of the econ­o­my in the mid­dle of the fis­cal year, which would be in March or April.

Pre­vi­ous min­is­ters of fi­nance have al­so used the op­por­tu­ni­ty of the re­view to pro­vide their best es­ti­mate of the per­for­mance of the econ­o­my in the sec­ond half of the fis­cal year.

The 2025 Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view was de­liv­ered yes­ter­day, on June 18, main­ly be­cause there was a change of ad­min­is­tra­tion on April 28 and the new Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Dav­en­dra­dath Tan­coo, ob­vi­ous­ly need­ed time to come to terms with the Her­culean task he faces in bal­anc­ing the ex­pec­ta­tions of the pop­u­la­tion with the re­al­i­ties of the T&T econ­o­my. Those re­al­i­ties in­clude the fact that T&T’s pro­duc­tion of its main en­er­gy ex­ports of nat­ur­al gas, crude oil and petro­chem­i­cals are all down from their peak lev­els. The prices of those main ex­ports are al­so gen­er­al­ly low­er than in the re­cent past.

Those two el­e­ments, the re­duced pro­duc­tion and prices of the coun­try’s main ex­ports, mean that any min­is­ter of fi­nance de­liv­er­ing a Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view in June 2025 would be bat­ting on the prover­bial sticky wick­et.

In a pre­sen­ta­tion that spent a great deal of time bash­ing the op­po­si­tion, when Mr Tan­coo fi­nal­ly turned to pro­vid­ing a cur­rent sta­tus re­port on the T&T econ­o­my, he said, “The up­date of the state of the econ­o­my is that we are in cri­sis be­cause of the ac­tions of those op­po­site,” re­fer­ring to the Op­po­si­tion Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment.

There are no cir­cum­stances in which a min­is­ter of fi­nance should use the word “cri­sis” (or bank­rupt­cy) to de­scribe an econ­o­my that he/she is in charge of, un­less this is meant to pre­pare the coun­try for im­mi­nent and crit­i­cal dis­cus­sions with the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, the glob­al lender of last re­sort.

T&T’s cur­rent min­is­ter of fi­nance did pro­vide the coun­try with an es­ti­mate of the over­all fis­cal deficit for the 2025 fi­nan­cial year, which he pre­dict­ed would be $9.67 bil­lion.

On how T&T would fund this deficit, Mr Tan­coo said, “Giv­en the state of the econ­o­my at present, we are forced to fund this in­creased deficit prin­ci­pal­ly by our bor­row­ings on the lo­cal cap­i­tal mar­ket, as well as by draw­ing down on ex­ist­ing mul­ti­lat­er­al fa­cil­i­ties.”

Un­for­tu­nate­ly for the coun­try, the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance pro­vid­ed no de­tails of how much of the $9.67 bil­lion he ex­pects to fund from bor­row­ings on the lo­cal cap­i­tal mar­ket and how much from draw­downs from the mul­ti­lat­er­al fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions.

In de­liv­er­ing the first post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence of her sec­ond term in of­fice on May 8, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar es­ti­mat­ed that the fis­cal deficit in March 2025 was $4.42 bil­lion. At that time she al­so said the deficit would be fund­ed by with­draw­ing $1.76 bil­lion (US$260 mil­lion) from the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund (HSF), draw­ing down on the avail­able $2.7 bil­lion in the over­draft fa­cil­i­ty at the Cen­tral Bank, re­fi­nanc­ing $1.1 bil­lion in Trea­sury Bills and bor­row­ing $1 bil­lion on the lo­cal mar­ket.

Five weeks lat­er, the fact that Mr Tan­coo out­lined few­er de­tails than his prime min­is­ter on the crit­i­cal is­sue of deficit fi­nanc­ing pro­vides the pub­lic with lit­tle com­fort.

As one of the most im­por­tant min­is­ters in a new ad­min­is­tra­tion that promised to do much bet­ter than its pre­de­ces­sor on the cru­cial is­sues of trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty, Mr Tan­coo has a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­vide the pop­u­la­tion with more de­tails.