"*I don’t think we need to have the Barbados example to hang our hat on*"

True. But the reality is Barbados has a sophisticated thinking class and its been active for decades. If they had had the blessing of our location I believe we would have seen exactly how to revolutionize a 14mil tourist tourism product. It may be due to the longstanding presence of a rigorous university, or it may be that they're simply smarter, more analytical. Nothing wrong with following a smart, sensible example if it does not fundamentally contradict your objectives.

While Barbados is giving their banks sensible guidelines like you *cant charge fees on transaction lower than 10,000 and at least one bank account should be fee free*, we still have voices here saying, it's a business, een nothing you could do.

They also need to look at their usage agreements. They're brutal. How am I responsible for fraud in your system if you cant create a safe environment for use? And what happened to data privacy, how do you have the right to share "details" about my financial transactions with vaguely defined actors and by your language, for any reason, "*curiosity*" might even work, without notifying me?

You obviously never got to see Poodling's highly confidential political strategy memo, written shortly after independence, on the need for his PLP government to dumb-down the Bahamian people and open our nation's doors to illegal aliens in order retain political power for as long as possible.

And that political strategy of destroying the quality of education and critical thinking skills of Bahamians, in order to create easily manipulated and undiscerning voters, kept Poodling in office as PM for the first 25 years after independence, effectively laying a solid foundation for the continued nurturing by his successors of the utter mess our nation finds itself in today.

As usual, slimy Fwreddy Boy is bloviating hot air, knowing that nothing meaningful will be done to address the matters he speaks of.

Slimy Fwreddy Boy knows full well that RBC and CIBC have the government by the short and curlies. These two banks alone have the power to hold up or stop government payroll from being met simply by reining in a portion of the mega million dollar overdraft facilities they have extended to the Public Treasury/Ministry of Finance, the terms of which have been breached by government over and over again and require ongoing periodic waivers of key restrictive covenants.

And Slimy Fwreddy Boy knows more than most that our minister of finance, namely corrupt PM Davis, does not want to receive any phone calls from senior bank executives in Canada threatening to withhold or reduce vital credit facilities the government uses to meet its bloated payroll.

What's really disappointing here is that the Governor of the Central Bank (John Rolle) continues to allow himself (and his institution) to be used as a convenient punching bag by corrupt politicians who are not the least bit inclined to the fee gauging by commercial banks through the drafting and passing of appropriate legislation and related regulations.

He is saying customers need to complain to the Central Bank. They get complaints. But their response is always that they can't get involved in that. The regulatory bodies here don't regulatory. They're just there for show, to create the illusion of a robust system.

Blame for government tolerating price gauging properly belongs in the lap of Stumpy Davis as minister of finance because John Rolle and the Central Bank are answerable to him. But the fact of the matter is the Canadian banks know they have our corrupt PM by his short and curlies. Therefore, like Slimy Fwreddy Boy, all Stumpy Davis can do is bloviate to the public on the gauging issue.

gouging

This is beyond lip service now. Who controls the Central Bank? Is the Governor not appointed by the politicians? Why do they have to beg the Central Banak to do its job, and why are they not in Parliament legislating instead of just talking?

Sadly, John Rolle as Central Bank Governor cannot pass gas without first getting the consent of PM Davis as Minister of Finance to go ahead and fart.

The central bank is to blame for higher banking costs due to over-regulation of the financial sector...

You are obviously referring to all of those ridiculous laws and regulations that were put in place as a result of our incompetent parliamentarians genuflecting and kowtowing to the likes of the OECD bureaucrats and other global financial regulators who have imposed on domestic commercial banks in our small nation a huge regulatory cost burden for the purpose of helping them identify and collect taxes due from their own taxpayers.

This is why a Bahamian can open a bank account in any of the OECD countries much faster and with greater ease than he or she can in the Bahamas.

Stumpy PM Davis and our Bone-Headed AG Pinder need to promote and pass new laws and regulations aimed at reducing the excessively high regulatory and other costs incurred by our commercial banks that naturally get passed on to their customers.

A hold also needs to be placed on the ability of foreign controlling shareholders of our commercial banks to repatriate their profits by way of dividends and other distributions until such time that our nation's foreign currency reserves are in a much healthier position to whether a serious downturn in the U.S. or global economy.

These are common sense measures that should be acted on now, and never put off until later!

"weather", not "whether"