2017 may be no better

He recalled that the Central Chambers of Commerce had also hit out at the country’s commercial banks, charging that they had treated the business community and the entire country unfairly during 2016. He said that while everyone was experiencing difficulty and business and the population was “cutting and chopping and trying to survive, yet still we have these financial institutions, commercial banks especially, not letting up on their charges. They continue to charge for every little thing, they continue to drop the rate of interest on deposits and they are not helping. They are the ones who are benefiting. If you check any institution in Trinidad and Tobago the banks are the ones recording the most amount of profit and they seem to be boasting about it.” He added that when the country is in difficulty the Government always calls on the business community to adjust: “when the price of fuel went up, they asked us to try to hold the cost of transportation down, hold our cost of services down and we did. The business community always are the ones called upon first to make adjustments and try to keep the inflation rate down. And we have been doing that.”

Ali said that in his own business the price of fuel had risen twice and he had kept his costs down even though it was difficult to do so. He said the business community in Central Trinidad had decided that sending people home would be their last resort and a lot of the business people would have absorbed additional costs in the running of their businesses “yet still we have the commercial banks not letting up on their charges or on the interest we have to pay on the loans and still they were not giving even a few extra points on the interest rates on deposits. They have to come on board and assist the country, they cannot just be there taking and taking and taking and showing record profits.” He said the members of the business community in the Central area know 2017 is going to be a difficult year and they had to be cautious in the running of their businesses and cautious in how they expanded and hope for the best.

Ali said that the business sector in Central is hoping that in 2017 the consumer would adjust their tastes toward more local produce and curb their appetite for foreign goods and luxurious items “so at least they could free up the foreign currency for the basic necessities, and then the commercial banks would have to implement something in terms of how they distribute the foreign exchange, in terms of how they prioritise the foreign exchange.” He added that perhaps it was about time to look at a CARICOM dollar, stating that the country had to come up with a solution to the scarcity of the US dollar so that its unavailability would not prevent trade with this country’s CARICOM neighbours. Reacting to suggestions that local manufacturers find substitute raw materials which they would not have to buy in US dollars, Ali said this might be possible but it would take a lot of time.