Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The return of the plague

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What you chaps all about? You are painting a picture of incompetence and in the same medium you are relieved abut LIAT? I'm really confused!

November 27, 2013 at 9:28 AM
Anonymous said...

Discarding all the politicking behind LPM's sometimes weak and weekly column is its failure to see the much larger picture. There are few systems thinkers in local politics. Take it or leave it!

Another obvious deficit in competitive Human Capital Formation/Development locally, is a lack of skills and expertise (SKAs)relating to Finance and Financial Management (incorporating especially, Risk Management, which SALCC, UWI-Saint Lucia Campus, and Monroe College, LONG AGO should have been EXTREMELY busy teaching as a business minor). These are not the very same type of animal as Accounting, which still today, remains to some extent very creative bean counting.

The Enron Scandal in the US, and those related to other accounting houses provide overwhelming testimony for those who are, or wish to remain informed observers of the rise and fall of companies and the socio-economic impacts of their financial machinations around the world. The J P Morgans and Bank Americas of the world come to mind.

Joining the dots: We continue to mess around with our adoration of 20th century education norms and objectives, and prostrate before mere crooks, numbskulls, social misfits and morons elected to government, by the uninformed and anti-intellectual parts of the populace -- and still expect to emerge from these and the country prudent financial decisions!

When will we ever come to the realization that retention serves only to perpetuate and prolong our miserable culture of the lack of accountability that allows for, and reinforces borbol as an accepted cultural norm?

Today, as in the past, any Minister of Finance and the ministerial organs of government continue to have the latitude, in the continued retention of this untenable and frustrating absence of rigourous controls, and checks and balances, to make the expected usual mocking noises about our state of parlous finances, in the full knowledge that they can get away with almost any unethical and unscrupulous behaviour -- with no negative consequences. This too is an unfortunate cultural norm.

Yet, little or no attention is being paid to the fact that this BORBOL issue, REPRESENTS a major COST FACTOR (financial uncertainty, elements sometimes UN-quantifiable), in the calculus of COMPETITVE business location decisions.

There is no gainsaying, that this must represent a concern to some investors, who for the very first time may be in the process of considering Saint Lucia as a suitable place in which to do business.

Those investors already here may be facing sunken costs.

These issues are especially important to those usually found sitting on the sidelines, or stuck habitually before talk-show microphones, mouthing their expected partisan inanities, regarding the recent drop in the country's rating as a suitable locale for doing business, or attracting FDI (foreign direct investment).

November 28, 2013 at 10:36 AM

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