BUSINESS MONDAY: We can’t shy away from economic dialogue, says PM

WHILE some people suggest they are tired of hearing about the global economic meltdown, Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Freundel Stuart, said he cannot afford to be so inclined to feel that way. He has told the media that’s because the downturn is a reality which he has to deal with from day to day.

The PM said that only recently, the leaders of the Group of Eight Industrial countries were asking at a meeting they held in Japan, how do they go about getting economies back together from that economic situation which unfolded in the last quarter of 2007.

“They were asking that against the background of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) when its World Economic Outlook 2016 indicated that return to growth was too slow and taking too long,” Stuart said.

The Barbados Prime Minister remarked that there was no consensus among those leaders about trying stimulus package or austerity to improve their economies, and that they left Japan with the view that each country should pursue its own policies, and which ever is successful, should be done by the others.

Stuart said that such is the context in which a country like Barbados is operating.

He said that the banking sector across the world has gone through a most trying period. In fact, misbehaviour in the banking has been a defining feature of this crisis, Stuart said.

The Prime Minister stated that the result of that has been that we here in the Caribbean have to fight what they have called De-risking, that is the cutting off of correspondent banking services from the respondent banks in Barbados and the Caribbean.
“In other words, cutting us off from the world,” according to the Prime Minister.

“Nobody has ever been able to tell me that there has ever been banking problems in the Caribbean. But because of what is happening elsewhere in the world, we are being asked to pay the penalty for the misdemeanours or sometimes the felonies of other people,” said the Prime Minister.

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