There is a for­eign ex­change short­age in this coun­try, but there is no need to de­val­ue the TT dol­lar at this time.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert re­it­er­at­ed that there were no plans to ad­just the val­ue of the TT dol­lar while speak­ing dur­ing Day 2 of the Ja­maica Pro­mo­tions Cor­po­ra­tion trade mis­sion at the Hy­att Re­gency yes­ter­day.

“Every month I have to say I am not go­ing to de­val­ue the dol­lar,” said Im­bert who point­ed to the fact that T&T cur­rent­ly has enough for­eign re­serves to hold off on such a move de­spite econ­o­mists clam­our­ing for it to be done.

“I said I wasn’t go­ing to de­val­ue the dol­lar; I’m not go­ing to de­val­ue the dol­lar. And we don’t have to. There is a rea­son for it. We have quite healthy for­eign re­serves, al­most US$7 bil­lion and our Her­itage (and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion) Fund is now back up over US$5 bil­lion. So be­tween our re­serves and our Her­itage Fund, we have over US$12 bil­lion avail­able to us.

“Cur­rent­ly, we have about eight and a half months of im­port cov­er, not count­ing the mon­ey in the Her­itage Fund,” Im­bert said.

But he did ad­mit there was a bit of scarci­ty of US dol­lars avail­able in the coun­try.

“So we don’t have a for­eign ex­change cri­sis but what we do have is a short­age.

“De­mand is out­strip­ping sup­ply,” said Im­bert, who said this scarci­ty was be­ing man­aged, at least for the busi­ness sec­tor, through the work of the Ex­im­bank (Ex­port-Im­port Bank of T&T), which had been al­lo­cat­ed over US$1 bil­lion to dis­trib­ute to busi­ness­es,” he said. He con­firmed an ad­di­tion­al US$180 mil­lion was ap­proved by the Cab­i­net to be pumped in­to Ex­im­bank to fur­ther bol­ster the dis­tri­b­u­tion to the busi­ness sec­tor.

Im­bert said how­ev­er the bank had al­so seen promis­ing re­turns from the busi­ness sec­tor in the past year.

“The amount of for­eign ex­change giv­en to the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty is now less than the mon­ey be­ing repa­tri­at­ed. So say we give them a bil­lion US dol­lars they are repa­tri­at­ed more than a bil­lion US dol­lars in terms of ex­ports and they are ac­tu­al­ly bring­ing the mon­ey back to T&T which shows there is con­fi­dence,” he said.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter al­so touched on the gov­ern­ment’s plans for the Drag­on field, ex­plain­ing that gas from that de­vel­op­ment could be used in var­i­ous plants in our en­er­gy sec­tor.

“It will be used in our petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor, be­cause cur­rent­ly there is spare ca­pac­i­ty both in our LNG plant and our methanol and urea plants,” he said.

The min­is­ter how­ev­er said that he still wished to see growth in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor as he urged for greater trade and in­vest­ment from our Caribbean neigh­bours.

“We want the non-en­er­gy sec­tor to grow, we would like our non-en­er­gy sec­tor to be as great a con­trib­u­tor to rev­enue or more than the en­er­gy sec­tor be­cause the en­er­gy sec­tor has a fi­nite life,” said Im­bert.