Pain without gain
published: Sunday | May 18, 2003
THE EDITOR, Sir:
IF THE Jamaican dollar was allowed to devalue to a realistic rate a couple years back, the country would be reaping the benefit of it today. Instead we used measures such as high interest rates, and borrowed money to keep the value of the dollar artificially high. It was obvious that we could not keep this up forever and the chickens are now coming home to roost.
I am glad to see the market is now doing what we did not have the guts to do. My only regret is that we will not be reaping the true benefit of this devaluation as we would have, if we had done a controlled devaluation several years ago but still, better late than later.
