Don’t tell Member of Parliament for St Michael West Chris Gibbs that Barbados has too much in foreign reserves.
The businessman remembers under the previous administration when there was hardly any foreign exchange cover and they could not pay their bills overseas, despite having money on the bank.
Gibbs said he was a third generation City businessman, following in the footsteps of his grandparents, who set up the operation in 1919.
“Now, under the last administration, we had to suffer the indignity of not being able to pay our bills. We had to send photos of the bank account to our suppliers overseas to say, ‘Look, we got money, we just can’t change it’,” he told the House of Assembly yesterday during debate on the Appropriation Bill 2025.
“So you can’t tell me that foreign reserves don’t matter. It matters because with a stable economy in tow, we were able to confidently restore the Government’s economic contribution to students at UWI (University of the West Indies), continuing the enfranchisement of our young people.”
Barbados had $3.2 billion in foreign reserves, equating to about 31 weeks of foreign exchange cover.
Without that cover, how would Barbados have been able to respond to the
COVID-19 pandemic, rapid ascending line of natural disasters like Hurricane Elsa, the ash fall, freak storm, Hurricane Beryl? Gibbs asked.
“We were able to adequately respond to thousands of homeowners and businesses with recovery. If it did not matter, how could we execute the ground-breaking and innovative debt-for-nature swap, allowing us the fiscal space to pay for the construction of the South Coast sewage plan? Let us not forget the sewage in the streets under the watch of the boys in the band. If it did not matter, would we have been able to offer salary increases to the public sector?” he asked.
Pointing to the statement made by Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne during his Reply to the Financial Statement and Budgetary Proposals 2025,
Gibbs said it was “the height of cognitive dissonance, intellectual dishonesty to say that foreign reserves don’t matter” and that Barbados has too much.
“You would tell the average man on the street that he got too much money in the bank?” he asked. ( SAT)
