Standard And Poors Does Stupidness

You don’t have to be a financial wizard or genius to know that The Bahamas was hit by a hurricane in October of this year by the name Matthew.  The hurricane caused an estimated one billion dollars of physical damage; the country is still trying to recover.  The country was shut down for four days and collected no revenue on those days.  The Brahmas Treasury lost 30 million dollar over those days.  The total loss to date is on hundred million dollars in revenue.  In the meantime, the country has to borrow 120 million to try and get some modicum of normalcy back to the country.  Freeport is still dead economically and trying or recover from the hurricane.  There some good news though: unemployment’s down to 11 per cent nationwide.  The Bahamar project is back and supposed to get going with hiring 100 people in January despite all the nay saying.  The Chinese put 700 million into construction and finishing the project and we have a new owner who is Chinese but it will run through one of his franchises the Rosewood company high end and American run.  Standard And Poors last time decided not to downgrade The Bahamas but to put us on negative watch because they said Bahamar was not back and going.  Now this time they say they are downgrading us because they say they don’t believe that Bahamar will have any impact on our economic situation. This is asinine.  The FNM is having a field day even though they  know the facts.  The  announcement on Tuesday 20 December was led by the predictable worthless Bahamian newspapers about The Bahamas being “Junked” or that the investment grade of The Bahamas was  junk.  That is foolish.  Investing in The Bahamas is good risk. There aint no terrorism here. We are in the American umbrella of protection.  Your money is safe here.  Standard and Poors are being less than honest for doing what they did and oh to boot, they don’t understand economics either.  What they understand it appears is how to be persuaded by opposition politicians who want the PLP to fail and so parrot a lot of junk rather than the truth.  So Bahamians ought to stiffen their backs.  In Barbados, they did the same thing an it  had no impact whatsoever. The salaries of Bahamians in the government will be paid on time, the bills will be paid.  For the ordinary man there is no impact whatsoever.  Oh and another thing there is not going to be any devaluation either.  Devaluation  makes no sense in a service economy where all the inputs are in American dollars and so if we devalue we will be driving up the cost of our product and cutting off our noses to spite our faces.  So give it all a rest people.