From Sep­tem­ber 2, 2025—which was the day of the first US strike on ves­sels in the South­ern Caribbean that were al­leged to be car­ry­ing il­le­gal drugs and nar­co­traf­fick­ers—T&T Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar em­braced the new Amer­i­can pol­i­cy of deal­ing with mar­itime craft in this re­gion.

Agos­ti­ni Ltd has un­der­gone a trans­for­ma­tion since 2020, more than dou­bling the scale of its op­er­a­tions through a com­bi­na­tion of strate­gic ac­qui­si­tions and steady or­gan­ic growth across its phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, health­care, man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness­es.

The Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny has an­nounced the ac­qui­si­tion of Trinidad Re­gion On­shore Com­pres­sor (TROC) from bp Trinidad and To­ba­go (bpTT).

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s plan to take con­trol of Venezuela’s oil in­dus­try and ask Amer­i­can com­pa­nies to re­vi­tal­ize it af­ter cap­tur­ing Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro in a raid isn’t like­ly to have a sig­nif­i­cant im­me­di­ate im­pact on oil prices.

Are T&T’s hopes of se­cur­ing long-term en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty through Venezuela’s Drag­on gas project are fad­ing fast?

On pa­per, in­fla­tion is pro­ject­ed to re­main low and growth is ex­pect­ed to be mod­est. The IMF’s coun­try view puts pro­ject­ed re­al GDP growth for 2026 at 1.0 per cent and con­sumer price in­fla­tion at 1.5 per cent. Yet walk in­to any board­room, re­tail out­let or small ser­vice busi­ness and you will hear the same con­cerns: cus­tomers are cau­tious, loy­al­ty is frag­ile and switch­ing is faster than ever.

Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Dav­en­dra­dath Tan­coo, said yes­ter­day the Gov­ern­ment is mov­ing ahead with its plan to re­move tax­es on pri­vate pen­sions as ini­tial­ly promised by the Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar dur­ing the 2025 gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign.

The world is un­der­go­ing a fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion. The ques­tion is whether T&T will keep pace with this rate of change. If we do not, then we will be falling be­hind. Take the com­put­er, a de­vice that we use every­day. For 60 years, it has op­er­at­ed un­der the same ba­sic mod­el: pro­gram­mers write ex­plic­it in­struc­tions, proces­sors ex­e­cute them se­quen­tial­ly, and ap­pli­ca­tions re­trieve pre­built re­spons­es from stor­age. That mod­el is end­ing. In its place, a new par­a­digm is emerg­ing that will make the close of 2026 look re­mark­ably dif­fer­ent from where we stand to­day. For T&T, an econ­o­my al­ready grap­pling with the en­er­gy tran­si­tion and mount­ing de­mo­graph­ic pres­sures, this shift presents both sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges and un­ex­pect­ed op­por­tu­ni­ties that de­mand our im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion.

Guardian Me­dia has con­firmed that the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC), Jay­selle Mc­Far­lane, has ten­dered her res­ig­na­tion af­ter al­most five years of ser­vice.

The eco­nom­ic down­turn has claimed two more ca­su­al­ties in T&T’s busi­ness land­scape, with Movi­eTowne clos­ing its To­ba­go cin­e­ma and The Home Store clos­ing its Ch­agua­nas branch.

Sales at one of the coun­try’s most pop­u­lar fast food fran­chis­es have plateaued due to job loss­es and gen­er­al eco­nom­ic un­cer­tain­ty in T&T.

Af­ter months of un­cer­tain­ty, some cus­tomers of Trin­ba­go Ex­press USA have be­gun re­ceiv­ing long-de­layed car­go, fol­low­ing in­ter­ven­tion by the Port Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (PATT). How­ev­er, sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns re­main, par­tic­u­lar­ly for cus­tomers whose goods are still held at oth­er ports, in­clud­ing the Port of Point Lisas.