Central Bank needs to hear from all the people that its mission to maintain the peg must be supported no matter what. If the peg fails we will become Venezuela or Argentina and it will all fall apart!

The B$ must not be allowed to fall.

If we want to encourage more people to build second homes, build more hotels like BahaMar, open new banks this is an exceedingly poor idea.

Now had folks listened we could have earned and saved more from our tourism industry had we banned cruise ships.

Past is the past for now tho on this, for right now and the next few months we need to make our food with local growing and own energy with solar power till tourism returns.

Hie is right we can not just print more money.

Every dollar must be carefully watched at this point.

BPL must be sold into private hands immediately tho to stop more drainage in terms of the public purse having to prop it up tho.

And we need a massive country wide agricultural program to grow what tourist dollars can not do (pay for import food). Seriously, every community, every parish needs to start a community gardens now given the lead times from planting to harvest. And we need much more solar. We are so behind on both fronts I hope people and government will rise to the challenge and not go the easy route of print more money, deplenish the hard currency and then have total collapse like Zimbabwe. It is that serious folks. This country needs to get it together now!

Atlantis and Bahama Mar will not reopen in mid May! And if they did no one would be there in any event! We need to be prepared for 12-18 months of tourism shut down and start acting accordingly.

BPL Needs to come off the government books immidately. The public can no longer keep finance the catastrophe that are its finances. It should have been sold ages ago, but either way, even if we get $1 for it in a sale to a private operator it would be better than having to issue more government guarantees for fuel purchases (which surely will have to be made good on at some point) and more cash transfers to keep covering its losses and saddling the public with more "bonds" to pay for past problems.

As far as insurance goes, we need to think about a conversion to payments based on what's actually in the fund as far as capital and income are concerned and see from here it gets transferred to fully third party management to ensure everyone they get what they are due, not sure how much longer the can can be kicked down the road.

We also need a Marshall Plan type program for a) solar power now so we do not have to send so much money out of the country for fuel and b) agriculture so we can grow food locally instead of paying to import it with tourist revenues we are not going to have the next few months. This needs to be implemented on the double so everyone has food and electricity.

If we stick together this can be weathered, but business as usual has to be rethought. We can not just print whatever we need in terms of money as then you put at risk the dollar peg to the USD with catastrophic consequences if you lose that.

Here's a game changer:

Kick out the cruise ships and then visitors will have to stay in hotels where Bahamians can be employed to serve them, clean the rooms, make food etc. instead of the foreign workers who serve them on cruise ships!

Why is this so hard? For decades his country has let its #1 industry be taken over by the cruise industry with continued permit approvals for them to expand. Hopefully this is the opportunity to get it right and put the economy back on track, which is really SO simple.

If people have fear of deportation they will not come forward. Given the history of the past few years it would be more than understandable if words alone will frankly not convince many it is better to stay in the shadows if they are here without authorization.

This means they could spread COVID-19 to other people including citizens.

Aggressive deportation policies have not put us in a great spot to be able to gain the required trust of the Haitian community today in this emergency.

A more fundamental rethink of the problem of undocumented persons in the Bahamas I think is required to truely get us thru this. Some form of new sped up and streamlined legislated pathway to having an immigration status for undocumented persons I think would make this better for all and help to defeat COVID-19. Should we not do everything in the tool box to help defeat COVID-19?

Agreed. We need agriculture to grow food on the islands and not pay so much to import it. If the dollar peg was ever lost we would starve! These numbers should alarm everyone. Bahamians need to come together now and start growing in local coops if need be. There isn't a moment to lose really, unless we want to sick back and starve. We need local agriculture. Eleuthera should be farmed again, and greenhouses in Nassau and Freeport too.

All good ideas. But you have to deal with the fact we get almost nothing from cruise ship visitors and the cruise industry grows all the time. You need these tourists to start staying in hotels where Bahamians are employed not on ships where foreigners serve them.

Salvation has one path:

Ban cruise ships now and forever in concert with other nations, and then when the outbreak is over, tourism will return and we will be able to capture more of the tourist spend from their staying in hotels.

Otherwise the future revenue from tourism will not be enough to a) offset this fall and b) prepare for the next major Dorian.

You can not keep going as you have been and hoping for the best any longer!