The av­er­age small busi­ness starts with a sol­id plan, a cash flow pro­jec­tion and, most times, a start-up loan from a fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion.

Mar­itime trans­port re­mains the back­bone of the glob­al trad­ing sys­tem. Ac­cord­ing to the Unit­ed Na­tions Con­fer­ence on Trade and De­vel­op­ment (UNC­TAD), more than 80 per cent of glob­al mer­chan­dise trade by vol­ume is car­ried by sea, un­der­scor­ing the es­sen­tial role of ship­ping in con­nect­ing economies, sup­ply­ing in­dus­tries, and de­liv­er­ing every­day goods to con­sumers.

The lat­est En­er­gy Ser­vices Sec­tor Sur­vey (ES­SS), con­duct­ed by the En­er­gy Cham­ber, re­veals a de­cline in both the vol­ume and val­ue of busi­ness dur­ing the first quar­ter of 2026. Ac­cord­ing to the find­ings, 60 per cent of re­spon­dents re­port­ed that the val­ue of their busi­ness was low­er than nor­mal, while 56 per cent in­di­cat­ed that their vol­ume of busi­ness fell be­low typ­i­cal lev­els.

When peo­ple in T&T think about mi­gra­tion, the same des­ti­na­tions usu­al­ly dom­i­nate the con­ver­sa­tion: the Unit­ed States, Cana­da, and the Unit­ed King­dom. These routes feel fa­mil­iar, but they have be­come in­creas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to ac­cess. Visa back­logs, tighter im­mi­gra­tion rules, ris­ing liv­ing costs, and long pe­ri­ods of un­cer­tain­ty have made mi­gra­tion feel out of reach for many.

From fill­ing a gap or pro­vid­ing so­lu­tions to the com­mu­ni­ty to es­tab­lish­ing a coun­try­wide name, Mus­lim busi­ness­es have achieved great suc­cess while pass­ing the reins from one gen­er­a­tion to the next.

Fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy is a crit­i­cal life skill that pro­tects young peo­ple from so­phis­ti­cat­ed dig­i­tal scams and builds na­tion­al eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty, Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Lar­ry Howai said, as he warned sec­ondary school stu­dents that fraud­u­lent schemes promis­ing high re­turns—such as turn­ing $500 in­to $2,000 in two weeks—are in­creas­ing­ly tar­get­ting youth via so­cial me­dia and di­rect mes­sages.

For many en­tre­pre­neurs in T&T, sus­tain­abil­i­ty can feel like a lux­u­ry re­served for large cor­po­ra­tions with deep pock­ets. Small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es (SMEs) of­ten op­er­ate with lim­it­ed re­sources while fac­ing grow­ing ex­pec­ta­tions to adopt en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly and so­cial­ly re­spon­si­ble prac­tices.

In an era when many busi­ness­es are tight­en­ing their belts and eye­ing the bot­tom line with cau­tion, the team be­hind Tom­my’s is ex­pand­ing.

Guardian Me­dia Ltd (GML) yes­ter­day re­port­ed an af­ter-tax prof­it of $2.25 mil­lion for the quar­ter end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2025, a 66 per cent de­cline com­pared to the $6.74 mil­lion the me­dia com­pa­ny earned for the same quar­ter in 2024.

De­spite a chal­leng­ing op­er­at­ing en­vi­ron­ment marked by in­creased du­ties, glob­al tar­iff ad­just­ments and evolv­ing con­sumer trends, An­gos­tu­ra Hold­ings Ltd re­port­ed af­ter-tax prof­its of $153.32 mil­lion for the year end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2025, a 6.27 per cent in­crease over its 2024 per­for­mance.

The liq­uida­tor of Cli­co In­vest­ment Bank (CIB) has lost a law­suit seek­ing to hold three for­mer ex­ec­u­tives and board mem­bers ac­count­able for the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion’s col­lapse al­most two decades ago. 

The war waged by the Unit­ed States and Is­rael against Iran could neg­a­tive­ly im­pact liv­ing stan­dards in T&T, as it could re­sult in high­er food prices, in­creas­es in the price os gaso­line and pos­si­bly an ero­sion of the coun­try’s for­eign re­serves.