IF?THERE?IS one underscored message from Moody’s Investors Service’s downgrading of Barbados’ domestic currency rating, it is that we are not out of the woods by a long shot, and we just must stop living above our means.
And though Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler would rather take heart in the seemingly opposite prognostication of Standard & Poor’s (S&P) and its maintained BBB-investment grade rating for Barbados, we urge strongly cautious optimism.
We would want nothing more than that S&P credit analyst Olga Kalinina is right that the Barbados “economy has bottomed out and that economic activity is now accelerating”. But taking nothing for granted, the Government’s continuing effort must be to stunt the national debt growth.
We cannot have the exemplar credit rating for which we have been known internationally falling to any junk bond status.
Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler is in no enviable position. He is sworn to not cutting back on education, or cutting public sector jobs. And, at the moment his Government is challenged in the streamlining of burgeoning health care costs.
If the Freundel Stuart administration is to address the twin issues of the deficit and the debt, some analysts say, the big elephant in the room – the Government’s payroll – must be tamed and withdrawn. But Mr Sinckler has pledged there will be no “unravelling [of] the social fabric and economic stability of the country, by instituting unnecessary and unreasonable measures that [could] wipe out the social gains”.
Political words of comfort, if nothing else. But we need more than that. We must feel an unshakeable confidence in the Minister of Finance, as we all work our way out of this recession.
We must be able to believe that we have an accurate picture from our Government of our circumstances; that we are being levelled with; that we are being taken into this administration’s confidence.
We are not clamouring, as Opposition Leader Owen Arthur is, for heads to roll. All heads at this time are better on!
This is not the occasion for politicking. Still, some counsel may be gained from Mr Arthur’s contributions – outside the partisanship.
The blunt fact of economic life in Barbados is that Moody’s has given us a wake-up call. Not for panicking, but sober reflection.
For even though within the last 24 hours Mr Sinckler’s shock has segued into relief, we cannot yet go our separate ways obliviously.
We are all in this together. To the plough we all must come – to ensure our economic outlook is indeed stable.
