In the light of the current public discussion on the Copyright Act and the antagonism against our cultural pirates, consider the use of cultural material as in the ‘cultural or digital commons’. The context is the Internet that could be a common space of cultural information available for the public to share, rework and remix. For example the old books or films made before 1923 or old Sparrow songs, on which copyright has expired, could form in part this growing pool of global information.

Downtown we are building the physical infrastructure to house our proposed International Financial Centre. A recent symposium was held to discuss the way ahead. One of the concerns of GOTT reported in the newspapers was money laundering for which the Minister of Finance, Ms Nunez-Tesheira, said, some control legislation is being drafted. Making T&T into a financial centre has been on the cards for many years.

T&T has a population of 1.3million people. It cannot produce all that it needs. T&T has to produce enough of particular goods and services for export, to earn foreign exchange in order to import what it requires. Therefore, T&T should be particularly concerned about its competitiveness and globalisation. The US has a population of some 250million people and in theory can produce all that its population requires except, given certain self imposed constraints, some energy products.

When the topic of our International Finance Centre is being discussed by our Government and even some of our financial community one gets the distinct impression that such a centre is to be established, not as a vehicle to facilitate economic diversification, but as a standalone industry as part of this diversification. Financial services normally offered to the international community include banking, investment, insurance, intermediation and advisory services for asset management etc.

In July of last year I wrote a series of articles linking Peak Oil (the increase in demand over foreseeable supply of petroleum) to our government’s revenue, tourism, food prices and availability, and in general the impact of government’s fiscal policy on inflation and the Central Bank’s open market response to this profligate spending. In summary Peak Oil has increased tremendously the US$s available to our government and by spending most of it in TT$s we have been able to ‘proudly’ increase our GDP at the expense of contracting the Dutch Disease.