Mar 2007 Financial News

Minister Enill says:T&T’s inflation rate on the decline

Mar 02, 2007

T&T’s inflation rate is on the decline, Minister in the Ministry of Finance Conrad Enill says, attributing the development to the Government’s prudent management of the economy.

Enill said yesterday indicators suggested the Government could be on the road to attaining a five per cent inflation rate, a far cry from the ten per cent that obtained some time ago.

The minister spoke about the issue during the post-Cabinet news conference at Whitehall in Port-of-Spain.

On the last occasion ... I indicated that the challenge of expansion that the Government was facing was inflation—that it would rise and then it would fall.

One month later, every newspaper and television station... had a screaming headline, Ten Per cent - Slippery Slope,” he told reporters.

Enill recalled that the Government had said it would be introducing a number of measures to reverse the ten per cent trend.

Since then, we have looked at the inflation rate....it started at ten (per cent), it went to 9.6, then it went to 9.1, and on the basis of the last information that was available, it is now at 8.6. “We had said that our medium term target was seven per cent, the longer term target at five per cent. On the basis of the information that is available to us now, we believe that that is attainable,” he said.

Enill said the downward trend had highlighted the importance of public education.

In the work that we were doing we started to present to the population with information about prices... And and I think to a large extent, elements of the mark up inflation that was very rampant, in fact disappeared, or in some instances, decreased,” he said.

Enill made it clear, however, that the Government was still tackling “supply side” issues as well as matters of monetary supply.

We have taken out from the system money that would ordinarily go into consumer spending and is now into savings,” he explained.

Enill said the last offer that the Government had placed on the market was oversubscribed and that ended up with us taking up significantly more than we had anticipated.”

He added that the promise that the Government had made in the budget as it related to the national financial literacy programme had been launched and there was now a programme dealing with educating the public on financial investments.

These matters we consider to be extremely positive and continues to be the response of our ongoing efforts to achieve the results that we have set out, which really is to create the circumstances by which we can call ourselves a developed country, certainly before the year 2020,” Enill said.

Corey Connelly
The Trinidad Guardian
Friday, March 1, 2007.
http://www.guardian.co.tt/news7.html