For­mer Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor and fi­nance min­is­ter, Win­ston Dook­er­an, be­lieves that while on the sur­face, T&T’s macro­eco­nom­ic in­di­ca­tors re­main “com­fort­able”, the Gov­ern­ment must pro­vide more de­tails on how it will solve deep­er is­sues like pro­duc­tiv­i­ty chal­lenges and the ris­ing cost of liv­ing.

The Cen­tral Bank of T&T has held its bench­mark re­po rate steady at 3.50 per cent, cit­ing low do­mes­tic in­fla­tion along­side mount­ing glob­al un­cer­tain­ty linked to geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions and ris­ing com­mod­i­ty prices.

Busi­ness process out­sourc­ing com­pa­ny Bill Gosling Out­sourc­ing (BGO) has deep­ened its in­vest­ment in Trinidad and To­ba­go with the open­ing of a new pur­pose-built of­fice in Trinci­ty, bring­ing 200 jobs to east Trinidad and sig­nalling plans for fur­ther ex­pan­sion.

Shell said yes­ter­day that re­cent se­nior va­can­cies that have been pub­licly ad­ver­tised are not con­nect­ed to the Man­a­tee project.

For near­ly two decades, Port-of-Spain has en­dured se­vere flood­ing that halts busi­ness, par­a­lyzes trans­porta­tion, and in­flicts mil­lions in loss­es with alarm­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty. The cat­a­stroph­ic floods of No­vem­ber 2008 and No­vem­ber 2011 were clear warn­ings — yet they were some­what un­heed­ed.

A Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing signed be­tween the Unit­ed States and Iran last week has giv­en the glob­al avi­a­tion in­dus­try its first re­al sense of op­ti­mism in over 100 days.

Have you been look­ing in­to get­ting a US-dol­lar de­nom­i­nat­ed ac­count where you could re­ceive Pay­Pal de­posits, re­mote job salaries, ACH and wire trans­fers? The Charles Schwab In­ter­na­tion­al ac­count is a great plat­form for you. It is a bro­ker­age ac­count typ­i­cal­ly used for in­vest­ing, how­ev­er, it comes with a wide range of bank ac­count fea­tures that now give you ac­cess to a USD ac­count to re­ceive glob­al pay­ments — and the best part is you can open it re­mote­ly, with Per­son­al and Joint ac­counts be­ing free to open.

Twice this month, this col­umn has ad­dressed the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion’s use of se­lec­tive, com­pet­i­tive pro­cure­ment process­es to se­lect con­trac­tors for ma­jor hous­ing projects in Trinidad. The is­sue was high­light­ed on June 4 un­der the head­line Who will ben­e­fit from the Re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion projects? and on June 11, with the head­line, Will the OPR do the right thing? Both of those com­men­taries looked at the pro­cure­ment de­ci­sions made by State en­ti­ties, the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) and Land­mark­TT Prop­er­ties Ltd.

When Al­li­son De­mas set up shop in the base­ment of Bea­con In­sur­ance’s of­fices on Stan­more Av­enue in 2011, she sunk most of her sav­ings in­to the ven­ture, per­suad­ed her moth­er to in­vest on “pure blind faith” and se­cured a loan from Re­pub­lic Bank. No Caribbean com­pa­ny had done what she was propos­ing, to track, elec­tron­i­cal­ly, what was run­ning on lo­cal ra­dio, tele­vi­sion and in news­pa­pers, then sell that da­ta to ad­ver­tis­ers and me­dia hous­es.

To ho­n­our his fa­ther, Gre­go­ry Lou­saing, af­ter his pass­ing, Jo­van Lou­saing re­cent­ly took a leap of faith that his dad had en­cour­aged him to make: start his own re­al es­tate busi­ness.

Min­is­ter of Trade, In­vest­ment and Tourism, Satyaka­ma Ma­haraj, does not be­lieve the State of Emer­gency (SoE) has dis­rupt­ed busi­ness in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Agos­ti­ni Group Ltd has for­mal­ly closed its takeover bid for Pres­tige Hold­ings Ltd af­ter se­cur­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 96.8 per cent of the com­pa­ny’s is­sued and out­stand­ing shares, po­si­tion­ing the con­glom­er­ate to take con­trol of the restau­rant and food ser­vices op­er­a­tor.