Now, your Eyewitness ain’t no economist or anything like that. Far from it. But he does know that, if you put a thumb into your mouth and pull out a plum, you an’t just a “good boy”; you’re a goddamn magician!! Meaning that there’s action followed by reaction, and the two are connected. So, where’s your Eyewitness going with all of this? Just that he went to the bank, where he hoards his hard-earned Guyana Dollars, and asked them for a bank draft in US dollars to pay for something he’d bought from foreign for his much better half!! And guess what he was told?? The Bank didn’t have no US dollars!!
Now, by now you’d know your Eyewitness ain’t no extravagant kinda guy. In fact – if the truth be told – he’s earned a reputation as a bit of a skinflint!! So, you know this was no transaction that would raise even Scrooge’s eyebrows!!
“What the heck’s going on?” he asked the teller exasperatedly!! Said that was “above her paygrade, and she didn’t know.” So, your Eyewitness decided to speak to the manager – whom he assumed should know about these things.
My point to the manager, in his air-conditioned cocoon, was that we were now earning BILLIONS and BILLIONS of US greenbacks every year from our oil under the Atlantic.
“Aren’t those billions intermediated by your bank and other banks – after the Bank of Guyana receives a notification of greenbacks deposited into our NRF in the NY Fed??” your Eyewitness asked quizzically.
“I couldn’t say,” the fella replied in fruity tones…which just made your Eyewitness go ballistic!!
Didn’t we go through this rigmarole a couple of years ago?? And we discovered that the Bank of Guyana was doing what it was supposed to be doing, and it was the local banks who were playing footsies with certain preferred customers, and the Devil take the hindmost — which is where your Eyewitness was positioned quite firmly right now, thank you!!
The fella looked scandalized, but stuck to his line: “Don’t got no greenbacks, man!! Our big customers also import a lotta foreign goods, and we hafta give them priority on the greenbacks from BoG”.
So, your Eyewitness adopted the tone he uses for idiots and morons in order to ask quite slowly, “Well, your Eyewitness just read that we had almost half a million visitors from foreign last year. Most of them bring back greenbacks, don’t they?”
“Well, that might be so, my good man, but most of them go to the Cambios…not us!!” You could have heard his voice drip with disdain when he said the word “Cambios” – implying THEY might be willing to play tiddlywinks with the missing greenbacks!!
Will someone find some greenbacks before your Eyewitness’s wife splits??
…the peaceniks gone??
For those who don’t remember, or aren’t old enough to do so, your Eyewitness’s questions allude to the classic song “Where have all the flowers gone?” – which was covered by so many greats during the anti-war days of the 1960s. The question alludes to the horrors of war by answering that “young girls pick them” and they go to young men who have gone to become soldiers – who end up in graveyards. And the graveyards?? “Gone to flower, every one of them”!! The refrain asks poignantly, “When will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn?”
The “they”, of course, are those who start wars and keep stoking them. And as we can see all around the world, there ain’t no shortage of “them”!! As we know, to our cost, we have a Mad Maduro, off our western border, who clearly hasn’t learned anything after one quarter of his people have fled to foreign climes – including Guyana.
He yet calls for war!!
…the bluster gone?
Have you noticed a change in tone by the PNC representatives?? Are we getting a “kinder, gentler” PNC?? Imagine that one MP had to be upbraided and demoted for shaking Pressie’s hand!! Gasp!! What next?? Kisses??
