New­ly mint­ed Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young will meet the Bank­ing sec­tor next Tues­day con­cern­ing the al­lo­ca­tion of for­eign ex­change to the pub­lic.

ANSA Mer­chant Bank Ltd yes­ter­day re­port­ed af­ter-tax prof­its of $162.24 mil­lion for the fi­nan­cial year end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2024, a 25.5 per cent in­crease com­pared to the $129.29 mil­lion the com­pa­ny earned in 2023.

As glob­al trade wars con­tin­ue, Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try Paula Gopee-Scoon is ad­vis­ing the pri­vate sec­tor to re­main vig­i­lant re­gard­ing the over­all trade land­scape.

In my view, the fact that one of the first of­fi­cial de­ci­sions made by Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young was to se­lect new Min­is­ters of Fi­nance and Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty is both an in­di­ca­tion of the im­por­tance of those min­istries and of the need for change in the man­age­ment of the econ­o­my and of the crime sit­u­a­tion.

Founder of Van­i­ty In­ter­na­tion­al, Sher­ma Best is con­fi­dent that her in­no­v­a­tive, en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly cold tow­els will con­tin­ue to break in­to new re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets.

As a small is­land de­vel­op­ing state (SID) and net en­er­gy ex­porter, Trinidad and To­ba­go (T&T) has a unique po­si­tion in the glob­al en­er­gy tran­si­tion and cli­mate change space. The coun­try has sev­er­al op­por­tu­ni­ties to play an im­por­tant role both re­gion­al­ly and glob­al­ly through da­ta dis­clo­sures and project im­ple­men­ta­tion. But, there are al­so chal­lenges to over­come. With nat­ur­al gas tout­ed as the gate­way fu­el for the tran­si­tion, the coun­try has the twin chal­lenge of pro­duc­ing more gas to serve its do­mes­tic petro­chem­i­cal in­dus­try and ex­port­ing LNG to its glob­al clien­tele.

In T&T, we’ve of­ten heard the state­ment “there are over one mil­lion cars on the road.” This refers to the num­ber of reg­is­tered cars in the coun­try and does not take in­to ac­count dereg­is­tra­tion or in­op­er­a­ble ve­hi­cles. Over the last decade how­ev­er, over 213,000 ve­hi­cles have been reg­is­tered and yet fu­el sales have de­clined.

The Caribbean is be­ing urged to place more em­pha­sis on cli­mate change re­silience and di­vers­fi­ca­tion away from tourism de­pen­dent economies.

Plan­ning Min­is­ter Pen­ne­lope Beck­les is con­fi­dent that IDB In­vest’s US$150m deal with the Massy Group will be a per­fect in­cu­ba­tor for fu­ture col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the bank and the Gov­ern­ment.

The world is in a whirl­wind of trade wars due to tar­iffs that have been threat­ened to be im­posed by Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump. Still, Cari­com coun­tries are is hop­ing to avoid se­vere eco­nom­ic fall­out as a re­sult of an­oth­er US pol­i­cy.

Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) of the ma­jor­i­ty state-owned Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM), Ian Mitchell, is con­cerned about the on­go­ing glob­al trade wars which, he says, can pos­si­bly have an im­pact on the price of wheat that the com­pa­ny im­ports from North Amer­i­ca.

The Ch­agua­nas Cham­ber of Com­merce is call­ing on all po­lit­i­cal lead­ers to ad­dress the ur­gent eco­nom­ic and busi­ness chal­lenges fac­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go, fol­low­ing the an­nounce­ment of the gen­er­al elec­tion on April 28, 2025.