Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley toured the Men­to plat­form at the TOF­CO fab­ri­ca­tion yard yes­ter­day to get an up­date on the con­struc­tion progress.

Two more econ­o­mists have come out in sup­port of the TT dol­lar be­ing float­ed as a means of deal­ing with the coun­try’s on­go­ing for­eign ex­change chal­lenges.

In re­cent months, ac­cess to for­eign ex­change (forex) has be­come a ma­jor is­sue of pub­lic con­cern: Par­ents wor­ry about pay­ing fees for chil­dren study­ing over­seas; busi­ness­men are dis­tressed at the prospect of not be­ing able to pay for­eign sup­pli­ers in a time­ly man­ner; house­hold­ers want to buy goods on­line for which they have enough lo­cal cur­ren­cy (TTD).

Trinidad-born en­tre­pre­neur Shel­don Sci­pio can at­test to this, as he has turned his own frus­tra­tion over los­ing lug­gage in­to an av­enue for rev­enue, se­cur­ing a deal with Amer­i­can chain Wal­mart, whose rev­enue for its fis­cal year end­ing Jan­u­ary 31, 2024 was US$648 bil­lion.

Econ­o­mists and oth­er ex­perts have agreed that T&T’s busi­ness re­la­tion­ship with the Unit­ed States, its clos­est trade part­ner could be neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed based on the poli­cies that Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump’s new Gov­ern­ment takes.

CEO OF Am­cham T&T Ni­rad Tewarie says this coun­try's for­eign ex­change sit­u­a­tion is a hard prob­lem to solve as any move can have a ma­jor ad­verse ef­fect.

For­mer Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Mar­i­ano Browne does not agree that the Fi­nance Min­is­ter's stance is sole­ly based on an at­tempt to pro­tect the coun­try from in­fla­tion or a height­ened cost of liv­ing.

The Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL) achieved a prof­it at­trib­ut­able to eq­ui­ty hold­ers of $2 bil­lion for the year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2024.

The ANSA McAL group yes­ter­day de­clared prof­it be­fore tax of $568.11 mil­lion for the nine months end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2024, which is 21 per cent more than the 468.26 mil­lion the com­pa­ny re­port­ed for the same pe­ri­od in 2023.

Run­ning a com­pa­ny is not easy, as there are many ad­just­ments and chal­lenges to over­come along its jour­ney.

A 6.8 mag­ni­tude earth­quake shook east­ern Cu­ba on Sun­day, af­ter weeks of hur­ri­canes and black­outs that have left many on the is­land reel­ing.

At the end of an in­ter­view with a jour­nal­ist at the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre on the pub­lic hol­i­day for Di­vali, Oc­to­ber 31, Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter, Mar­vin Gon­za­les takes out his mo­bile phone and di­als a num­ber. Af­ter ring­ing nine times, the op­er­a­tor at the WASA call cen­tre an­swers. With­out iden­ti­fy­ing him­self as the line min­is­ter for the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA), Gon­za­les tells the op­er­a­tor that he would like to re­port a leak in the QRC round­about in St Clair from which litres and litres of wa­ter are be­ing wast­ed.