WE HOPED that, by now, the Golding administration would have taken the Jamaican people more fully into its confidence, speaking with realism about the crisis in the global economy and laying out squarely the actions it might have to take in the period of adjustment.

Maybe it is that the Government believes that it has done just that. But should the prime minister bother to find out, he will realise there is no sense of the gravity of the global crisis and the potentially grave dangers it holds for Jamaica in comments from Cabinet ministers and key economic spokesmen in their statements about what Gordon Brown has famously dubbed "the first truly global financial crisis of this new era of globalisation". Except, perhaps, for the intervention in the Senate on Friday by Don Wehby, minister without portfolio in the finance ministry, as part of the debate on the state of the nation.

This newspaper is wont to repeat the old maxim that in the management of economies, confidence is critical. In the building of confidence, involving many indefinable ingredients, context is important. Tone, too, is critical.

Seasonality factor

In the last month or so, the Jamaican dollar has depreciated by over five per cent, more akin to the rate at which we have become accustomed to it sliding over a year. In his Senate intervention, Mr Wehby provided a clear context: the liquidity crisis in the major economies triggered margin calls by United States (US) investments, causing Jamaican holders of government debt instruments to scurry for foreign exchange. And given the seasonality factor, inflows of foreign exchange are soft at this time. "In this context, we have seen a devaluation of the Jamaican dollar," Mr Wehby said.

Greed and self-interest

In a speech on Thursday, however, Mr Audley Shaw was leaving a sense of the bad old days, when markets were distrusted, foreign exchange was rationed and a suspicious state nosed around for greedy individuals who committed the cardinal sin of pursuing self-interest. Mr Shaw's reckoning - at least that is the impression many people who heard his remarks to the UDrive Association were left with - is that the economic fundamentals are largely undisturbed and it is the bad behaviour of a few that has disturbed "the normal inflows and outflows of foreign exchange". "There is no reason for it," he said. "And I am urging those who for any self or greedy basis would seek to be disruptive to the foreign exchange market, I beg you don't do it."

Long-term solutions

Flight to safety, of course, is rational economic behaviour, which is countered not by harangue, but by credible counter measures, such as the US dollar indexed bond sensibly floated by the Government last week.

Wehby's Senate speech did not have enough substance on the way forward, but it signalled an important departure from where we are, without seeking to saddle the predecessor administration with all the blame or assume that everything done in the past was bad. He acknowledged current fiscal and broader macroeconomic problems and longer-term solutions.

The Cabinet goes into a retreat in 10 days' time to review. Hopefully, when Mr Golding emerges, he will talk about the nuts and bolts of the crisis and the immediate measures to take us through.

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