Busi­ness lead­ers have all agreed that lo­cal and re­gion­al busi­ness­es must be pre­pared for all pos­si­ble out­comes in the es­ca­lat­ing con­flict be­tween the US and Venezuela.

Few in­dus­tries in T&T op­er­ate with mar­gins as thin and ex­pec­ta­tions as high as Car­ni­val. For mas­quer­ade bands, where the prod­uct is not sim­ply a cos­tum,e but an all-in­clu­sive, all-im­mer­sive ex­pe­ri­ence, every com­po­nent now sits un­der scruti­ny fol­low­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s 100 per cent hike in cus­toms and ex­cise du­ties on al­co­hol and to­bac­co prod­ucts.

The pri­vate sec­tor is call­ing for greater con­sul­ta­tion with the gov­ern­ment as there con­tin­ues to be un­cer­tain­ty about pol­i­cy di­rec­tion.

The Moody’s rat­ings agency yes­ter­day kept the Gov­ern­ment’s longterm lo­cal and for­eign cur­ren­cy is­suer and se­nior un­se­cured rat­ings at Ba2, but changed the out­look to neg­a­tive to re­flect what it views as short-term down­side risks.

Ke­ston How­ell is the new ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Bankers’ As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (BATT).

An­gos­tu­ra chair­man Gary Hunt said the com­pa­ny is in­ves­ti­gat­ing re­ports that a for­mer se­nior An­gos­tu­ra em­ploy­ee has launched her own ver­sion of the com­pa­ny’s fa­mous Aro­mat­ic Bit­ters.

CIBC Caribbean Bank yes­ter­day re­port­ed net in­come for its fi­nan­cial year end­ed Oc­to­ber 31 of US$159.71 mil­lion, a de­cline of 42.4 per cent com­pared with the prof­it of US$277.51 the bank de­clared in its 2024 fi­nan­cial year.

In a year that saw sev­er­al changes in its lead­er­ship, the First Cit­i­zens Group has re­port­ed in­creased prof­its for the fi­nan­cial year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30th, 2025.

The out­look for em­ploy­ment in T&T’s food ser­vices sec­tor has shift­ed dra­mat­i­cal­ly in the wake of the 2026 bud­get state­ment, which in­tro­duced high­er ex­cise du­ties on al­co­hol and to­bac­co prod­ucts.

A Cen­tral Bank re­port is­sued yes­ter­day states that in­di­ca­tors mon­i­tored by the Cen­tral Bank sug­gest that eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty re­bound­ed in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2025, while head­line in­fla­tion, mea­sured by the CSO’s Con­sumer Price In­dex (CPI), slid be­tween May and Oc­to­ber 2025 and there was a re­duc­tion in the de­mand for for­eign ex­change.

Pro­fes­sor Comp­ton Bourne opened with un­mis­tak­able clar­i­ty, cut­ting through the noise to re­mind Caribbean busi­ness lead­ers that while glob­al pol­i­tics swing wild­ly, it is eco­nom­ic pow­er, not diplo­mat­ic the­atre, that ul­ti­mate­ly shapes the world.
He warned that Caribbean gov­ern­ments and busi­ness­es risk be­ing dis­tract­ed by shift­ing po­lit­i­cal dra­mas, while miss­ing the struc­tur­al eco­nom­ic chal­lenges that will ul­ti­mate­ly make or break the re­gion’s trade fu­ture.  

So far for De­cem­ber 2025, the top news sto­ry for Guardian Me­dia Ltd has been the set­tle­ment of the 10 per cent wage in­crease for pub­lic sec­tor em­ploy­ees rep­re­sent­ed by the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion and the en­su­ing dis­pute be­tween the PSA pres­i­dent, Fe­l­isha Thomas, and the Gov­ern­ment, rep­re­sent­ed by the chief per­son­nel of­fi­cer (CPO), Dr Dr Daryl Din­di­al over the Gov­ern­ment’s pro­pos­al that some of the re­sult­ing back­pay would com­prise non-cash pay­ments.