Joe Issa Cool on Metaphor Depicting Jamaica’s Growth Path

Of the many metaphors used to laude Jamaica’s current economic recovery, from a light at the end of the tunnel to an engine at full throttle, business leader Joe Issa says he likes best the “sailing boat” allegory used by Gregory Fisher, managing director of Jefferies LLC, a United States-based investment and securities firm, to depict the island’s recent achievements and good prospects going forward.

In hailing the positive results being recorded under Jamaica’s economic reform programme, at the just-concluded 12^th Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) Regional Investments and Capital Markets Conference at the Jamaica Pegasus, Fisher likened Jamaica to a sailing boat at full sail with the wind at its back.

Issa, who said he absent at the high-level annual conference but is a big supporter, says in an interview, “I read Mr. Fisher’s comment and was quite amused…I thought it was a cleaver and apt metaphor for where we are at now and where we are going – on a boat at full sail aided by a positive head wind.”

Only recently, Issa congratulated several ministers of government on the successes they are having in reducing its major ills like crime and violence and unemployment, improving the business climate and justice and supporting the stock market, in order to achieve higher economic growth.

Reminded of Jamaica’s rough economic times which has stymied growth, compared with today, Issa says he sees the current positive developments and the prospects for the future in Rod Stewart’s mega hit song “I am sailing across the sea”, stating, however, that “it’s not in stormy waters anymore, as the song suggests, but instead, in calm waters.”

He also finds appropriate, R Kelly’s international single “The storm is over now”, in which Kelly is in a tunnel, can’t see the light and feels a strong wind, but then came a voice saying the storm is over now and he feels sunshine and heaven over him. 

The sentiments were shared by Fisher who, noting that Jamaica had made good progress last year under the IMF programme, citing record 64-year low inflation and 14.3% dividends to bond holders, said “we now have a country that has finally grown past the ills of austerity and is now in (transition to) full recovery,” according to the Jamaica Observer.

He informed that rating agencies had responded by upgrading Jamaica, at a rate higher than Barbados for the first time in history and that “Little Britain” is among other languishing Caribbean countries like The Bahamas; Bermuda; Trinidad and Tobago, which was downgraded; and the Dominican Republic, whose rating went up but the economy significantly underperformed in the markets.

According to Fisher, last year’s successes in Jamaica, in stark contrast to its neighbours, came on the back of an overall bullish capital markets whose performance has generated positive feedback from rating agency, Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC.

The agency has indicated it may raise the country’s rating over the next year, provided it “achieves sustained improvement in its external liquidity and indebtedness, along with a growing track record of sustainable public finances,” he was quoted as saying.

In encouraging Prime Minister Andrew Holness to stay the course “so that your beloved country can finally reach its full potential under your esteemed leadership,” Fisher told him that “the wind is at your back and your sails are full”, stating that the successor agreement, which was approved by the IMF Board last November, was a “job well done,” the newspaper reported.

He welcomed the positive feedback from Fisher in his keynote address at the conference themed: ‘Global Investment Horizon: Our Options and Our Future’, stating that it is imperative for Jamaica to get its economic affairs “in order” and assured, “that’s what we have been doing, as a Government.”