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Many of the peo­ple who have com­ment­ed on the call by Emile Elias, the vet­er­an con­trac­tor and ex­ec­u­tive chair­man of NH In­ter­na­tion­al (Caribbean), for a man­aged float with an ex­change rate of $9 to US$1, are wor­ried about the im­pact of the pro­pos­al on the price of im­port­ed goods and ser­vices:

* Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo, states, “A de­val­u­a­tion...has the po­ten­tial to dec­i­mate a large num­ber of small and medi­um sized busi­ness­es at a time when we need more pro­duc­tive ac­tiv­i­ty from them.  At the same time, our cit­i­zens would face high­er im­port costs, which would feed di­rect­ly in­to do­mes­tic in­fla­tion.”

* UWI St Au­gus­tine Pro­fes­sor Emir­i­tus, Patrick Wat­son, opines that de­pre­ci­at­ing the ex­change rate to $9 to US$1 could trig­ger a spec­u­la­tive spi­ral down­ward, that hoard­ing and spec­u­la­tion could re­sult and that more ex­pen­sive im­ports could hurt con­sumers. Cru­cial­ly, he ac­knowl­edges that “a de­val­u­a­tion sim­ply earns more TT dol­lars for the same US dol­lar rev­enue, with­out in­creas­ing to­tal for­eign earn­ings.”