San Juan, Trinidad-based AS Bry­den & Sons Hold­ings, which is ma­jor­i­ty owned by Ja­maica's Se­prod, yes­ter­day an­nounced it has ac­quired an ad­di­tion­al 30.4 per cent stake in Caribbean Pro­duc­ers Ja­maica (CPJ), a food and bev­er­age dis­trib­u­tor and man­u­fac­tur­er based in Mon­tego Bay.

St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Camil­lo Gon­salves says the coun­try's econ­o­my lost an es­ti­mat­ed EC$290.12 mil­lion (US$107 mil­lion) fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the two Trinidad-based in­sur­ance com­pa­nies in 2009.

The De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (CAF) has ap­proved US$250 mil­lion in fi­nanc­ing to sup­port two crit­i­cal re­silience and sus­tain­abil­i­ty ini­tia­tives in Trinidad and To­ba­go—re­silient road in­fra­struc­ture and re­silient ed­u­ca­tion­al in­fra­struc­ture.

Small and mi­cro en­ter­pris­es (SMEs) are vi­tal dri­vers of eco­nom­ic progress but de­spite their im­por­tance, many in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean re­main heav­i­ly de­pen­dent on cash.

The First Cit­i­zens Group, yes­ter­day de­clared au­dit­ed af­ter-tax prof­it of $957 mil­lion for its fi­nan­cial year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2024, 23.16 per cent more than the $777 mil­lion the ma­jor­i­ty state-owned earned in its 2023 fi­nan­cial year. In re­marks on the group’s per­for­mance, First Cit­i­zens chair­man, An­tho­ny Smart not­ed that the group’s to­tal as­sets stood at $47.1 bil­lion as at Sep­tem­ber 30, 2024, an in­crease of 4.84 per cent when com­pared to the 44.90 bil­lion for the 2023 fi­nan­cial year.

I am a T&T cit­i­zen res­i­dent in the US and, as such, I gen­er­ate a se­ries of cash flows from con­sul­tan­cy ser­vices and in­vest­ments with­in the Unit­ed States. Thus, I earn in­come and de­fray ex­pense us­ing the US dol­lar (USD) which seems to be the hot top­ic of dis­cus­sion in T&T these days. There­fore, as a re­cip­i­ent of a reg­u­lar USD in­flows, I de­lib­er­ate­ly prac­tise a sense of Trin­bag­on­ian pa­tri­o­tism as a small part of help­ing im­prove the sup­ply of hard cur­ren­cies.

The man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF), Kristali­na Georgie­va, Tues­day said that cli­mate change pos­es an acute threat to the Caribbean and that the costs for re­silience build­ing in the re­gion is es­ti­mat­ed at a stag­ger­ing US$100 bil­lion over the next two decades.

When most peo­ple in T&T think about valet park­ing, their main ref­er­ence may be a scene from a movie or the odd in­ter­na­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ence.

Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said yes­ter­day the Gov­ern­ment is al­so on track to fi­nalise at least 15 air ser­vice agree­ments with var­i­ous gov­ern­ments.

An­drea Scerch, pres­i­dent of Mas­ter­card's Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (LAC) says fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion re­mains im­por­tant for coun­tries in re­gion, not­ing that while some progress has been made there is still some work to do.

Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor, Nigel Ed­wards ad­mits the head­line in the T&T Guardian one week ago “UTC’s net in­come de­clines 89.4 %” caused ques­tions among the cor­po­ra­tion’s hun­dreds of thou­sands of sub­scribers.

While it has been made clear that buy­ing forex from a rel­a­tive can land you in trou­ble with the law ac­cord­ing to the Ex­change Con­trol Act, pre­vent­ing this kind of bar­ter­ing is sim­ply im­pos­si­ble in T&T.