Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert says “not a dol­lar” has yet been with­drawn from the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion, which con­tains US$6.1 bil­lion. How­ev­er, he says draw­downs will be made from the fund “on­ly as and when re­quired, and not ar­bi­trar­i­ly or by vaps.”

Apart from last Sep­tem­ber’s de­cline in nat­ur­al gas prices and the sub­se­quent un­prece­dent­ed col­lapse of oil prices, he said the glob­al eco­nom­ic shut­down re­sult­ing from COVID-19 al­so de­pressed de­mand for oil, caus­ing the re­cent oil price crash.

“This cri­sis is glob­al in scale and scope and the out­look is sub­ject to ex­treme­ly high un­cer­tain­ty in the con­text of its un­fold­ing char­ac­ter. With over 3 mil­lion con­firmed cas­es of the virus world­wide and over 200,000 deaths thus far, no one can re­al­ly say for cer­tain what next month will bring,” Im­bert said dur­ing yes­ter­day’s par­lia­ment sit­ting.

He said T&T was con­fronting a cri­sis “the likes of which we’ve nev­er seen”.

Not­ing var­i­ous oil price pro­jec­tions for June and oth­er pre­dic­tions, he said such fore­casts are “ex­ceed­ing­ly prob­lem­at­ic at this time”.

As a re­sult and with the con­se­quent ero­sion of T&T’s oil and gas tax rev­enue base, plus as the so­cial sup­port for cit­i­zens, Im­bert said T&T’s eco­nom­ic and fis­cal out­look and Bud­get is be­ing re­cal­i­brat­ed. The 2020 Bud­get was based on an oil price of US$60 and a gas price of $3.00

He said the glob­al econ­o­my is pro­ject­ed by the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund to con­tract sharply by at least 3.0 per cent in 2020, much worse than dur­ing the 2008-2009 fi­nan­cial cri­sis and there’s al­so ex­treme un­cer­tain­ty about the glob­al growth fore­cast.

“The eco­nom­ic fall­out is af­fect­ed by fac­tors which in­ter­act in ways that are hard to pre­dict, such as spread of the virus, the in­ten­si­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy of con­tain­ment ef­forts, ex­tent of sup­ply dis­rup­tions, the reper­cus­sions of the dra­mat­ic tight­en­ing in glob­al fi­nan­cial mar­ket con­di­tions, shifts in spend­ing pat­terns, be­hav­iour­al changes, such as peo­ple avoid­ing shop­ping malls and pub­lic trans­porta­tion, so­cial dis­tanc­ing, con­fi­dence ef­fects,” Im­bert said.

“For us in Trinidad and To­ba­go, we’re pro­found­ly af­fect­ed by volatile com­mod­i­ty prices. The im­pact on Trinidad and To­ba­go isn’t dif­fer­ent to any oth­er coun­try.”

But he said Gov­ern­ment’s work­ing with mul­ti­lat­er­al in­sti­tu­tions while fo­cus­ing on do­mes­tic so­lu­tions.

“We’ve rapid­ly ramped up how to de­liv­er sup­port in the face of a na­tion­al shut­down. We al­ready have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the chal­lenges, risks and trade-offs which we will face as we grad­u­al­ly restart our economies.”

He de­tailed in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance to ad­dress the un­prece­dent­ed fi­nan­cial de­mands of COVID-19: US$300m (TT$2b) from var­i­ous mul­ti­lat­er­al agen­cies plus a fur­ther US$500m (TT$3.4b) and TT$500m be­ing raised lo­cal­ly to pay for in­creased health sec­tor needs.

Im­bert said a plan for re­cov­ery from the virus’ eco­nom­ic ef­fects is be­ing han­dled in an­oth­er fo­rum. “We’re con­fi­dent the Road Map Com­mit­tee will bring a de­gree of cer­tain­ty to the shap­ing of our fu­ture. We’ve faced chal­lenges in the past and sur­vived. With the help of all cit­i­zens and Almighty God, we’ll do so again on this oc­ca­sion,” he said.