Business Page
Putting some sense in the 2009 Budget Introduction The National Assembly has the most unenviable task of making sense of the 2009 Budget presented last Monday in the National Assembly. The Minister of Finance apparently saw its greatest virtue as being the “biggest budget ever.” Not only is a boast on size from a Minister [...]
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Addressing the Clico issue Introduction Rumours that the region’s largest conglomerate CL Financial Limited (CL) was experiencing difficulties were confirmed at a dramatic press conference in Trinidad two Fridays ago, hosted by the Governor of the Central Bank and including CL’s chairman Lawrence Duprey and Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira. At the press conference it was [...]
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Integrity Commission on shaky ground Conclusion Re-cap Last week we ended the column with the offices listed in Schedule I to the act, the holders of which must automatically file with the Integrity Commission, declarations of their income, assets and liabilities of themselves, their spouses and minor unmarried children by June 30 of the following [...]
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Staggering increase in external debt Bad news The country’s stock of external public and publicly guaranteed debt rose by 20.3 per cent to US$804 million from the end of September 2007 to the end of September 2008. This dramatic increase has been reported in a quarterly report by the Bank of Guyana for the nine [...]
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On the line: Banks DIH Annual Report Banks DIH, the giant food and beverage company will be holding its 53rd annual general meeting on Saturday, January 17, 2009, close to four months following the end of its financial year of September 30, 2008. As a public company Banks is a reporting issuer for purposes of [...]
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Our world in 2009 Introduction Certainly the most authoritative publication which predicts the grand occasions and developments of the following year is the widely circulated Economist, published in the UK. Even by its own admission many of its predictions for 2008 were way off target. That of course is true of all other publications that [...]
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Introduction Today’s Business Page looks back not over the past year but to some fifteen years ago when on January 8, 1994, Ram & McRae (then Christopher L. Ram & Company) jointly with Ernst & Young Caribbean hosted a seminar ‘Managing for ecomomic recovery.’ Among the persons who made presentations were then Senior Finance Minister [...]
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Who’s left now? Conclusion The death of socialism Business Page last week suggested that amidst the cataclysmic dislocation to have rocked the capitalist world first manifested in the housing market in the United States, the response of the governments in the developed market economies is leading to a fundamental rethink of the role of ideology, [...]
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Who’s left now? The crisis facing the world economy is leading to a fundamental rethink of the role of ideology and the place of the ‘market’ in economic development. Some twenty years ago there was triumphalism in the West following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. With the [...]
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Response to a crisis Introduction Today’s column looks at some of the ironies and contradictions in the response to what started as a domestic crisis in the mortgage sector in the US and the prospects for the developing countries arising out of the Obama victory. The effect of the crisis has been wide, deep and [...]
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Adjustment time in Trinidad and Tobago Introduction It has been a challenging week for Trinidad and Tobago where crime seems to dominate the headlines in the dailies. In fact, crime had to share space with news on the economy and more dramatically with natural events in which persistent and unusual rainfall caused severe flooding in [...]
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David – a Goliath of a man David de Caires was very clear on what Business Page was about – the dissemination of financial and economic information and discussion of ideas and issues aimed at enhancing the business culture and environment. He was quick but polite in recognising my sometimes not too subtle attempts to [...]
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Curbing corruption: The Corruption Perception Index Conclusion Introduction Today we conclude this three-part article arising out of the publication of the 2008 Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International which ranked Guyana at a lowly 126 out of a total of 180 countries surveyed, with a score of 2.6 out of 10. No one can say [...]
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Curbing Corruption – The Corruption Perception Index Introduction Not unexpectedly, the Government has taken issue with the ranking accorded Guyana in the Transparency International (TI) Index for 2008 announced late last month. Of a total of 180 countries surveyed, Guyana was ranked 126 with a score of 2.6 out of 10, the worst score of [...]
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Died on a Monday, exhumed on a Wednesday and born on a Friday: The rescue of a rescue package It takes going back to the childhood nursery rhyme to capture the events of the past week in the United States of America. It was a week that began with Congress voting down a US$700B rescue [...]