Fol­low­ing years of what it de­scribed as “a se­vere and es­ca­lat­ing for­eign ex­change (forex or FX) cri­sis,” the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce yes­ter­day ad­vo­cat­ed the im­ple­men­ta­tion of an ex­change rate in which the TT dol­lar is aligned to de­mand and sup­ply, which the pri­vate sec­tor or­gan­i­sa­tion says would of­fer “a prag­mat­ic ap­proach to restor­ing bal­ance in the forex mar­ket.”

In a work­ing pa­per pub­lished yes­ter­day en­ti­tled Ad­dress­ing forex chal­lenges: The way for­ward, the T&T Cham­ber said the pri­vate sec­tor, par­tic­u­lar­ly SMEs, man­u­fac­tur­ers and new or emerg­ing ex­porters across both goods and ser­vices face mount­ing dif­fi­cul­ty ac­cess­ing forex when need­ed. This un­der­mines their abil­i­ty to op­er­ate, com­pete and scale in­to in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets, the body said.

The work­ing pa­per out­lines that one of the key dri­vers of T&T’s forex cri­sis is the cur­rent ex­change-rate regime, “which has re­sult­ed in the Trinidad and To­ba­go dol­lar be­ing over­val­ued for more than a decade.