Barbados’ large debt, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, would have triggered Wall Street’s latest downgrade of the island’s credit rating.
That’s how Charlie Skeete, a retired senior economic adviser at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, assessed Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgrade of Barbados’ rating last week when the firm pushed it further into junk bond territory by moving it from CCC+ to CCC.
Meanwhile, Sir Courtney Blackman, the first governor of the Barbados Central Bank, said that although he wasn’t “worried” about S&P’s downgrade, his major concern was the level of foreign reserves, which had declined in recent months.
Skeete told the DAILY NATION in an interview from his home in Virginia: “We owe away a lot of money and there is only one viable, respectable way to be able to pay it back and that is to go to the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. So, it is the job of S&P and Moody’s (another major Wall Street credit rating firm) to tell Barbados’ creditors, ‘You are dealing with a country that is becoming less and less likely to repay the money they owe you’. (TB)
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