“Cooper: Junk status nothing to celebrate” – The Nassau Guardian

Excerpt from this article; “Shadow Minister of Finance Chester Cooper charged yesterday that while there is some relief to The Bahamas avoiding a further downgrade from credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P), the maintained junk status is not much to celebrate.

Copper once again urged the government to communicate a clear path for growth and economic recovery.

‘It is hoped that the government is receptive to S&P’s advice and analysis on the need to focus on economic growth’, he said in a statement.”

You know there is only so much that anyone in the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) should have to say about the present economic state of the country, unless you are willing to sit down and answer some serious questions; and this is if you were a part of the last administration or not, in active politics or not.

First, let me say that while Chester Cooper MP, now calls for the Free National Movement (FNM) government to ‘communicate a clear path for growth and economic recovery,’ I must suggest that he must have been quite pleased with those communicated by the former Progressive Liberal Party government which led to four economic downgrades, because I never heard his voice raise up in objection or criticism to them, even as the country meandered down the disastrous economic path blazed by the Hon. Perry Christie’s PLP government, and this was as Prime Minister Perry Christie continued to tell the country that the ratings agencies just did not understand what his government was doing; well apparently a lot of us did not know what was being done and we doubted that the Minister of Finance at the time knew, as we were even further downgraded.

So as shadow Minister of Finance, Chester Cooper says, “….while there is some relief to The Bahamas avoiding a further downgrade…., the maintained junk status is not much to celebrate.” And he is correct that junk status is nothing to celebrate, he should acknowledge two things; first, how did we [The Bahamas] get to ‘junk status’ and second, that the Free National Movement (FNM) government was able to arrest the downward spiral that the former Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) had the country in.

Of course, he will not acknowledge these two facts and probably label this as an attack on the former prime minister and his administration but Mr. Cooper you did put it out there and probably sho0uld be a bit more careful of what you say in this effort just to be heard or because someone puts a microphone in your face.

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