Opposition spokes-man on finance Dr Omar Davies thinks his team did a better job to mitigate the 1990s financial crisis in Jamaica than the current actions of US President Barack Obama and his team.
"I was marginally involved, I took most of the cursing, but the technical groundwork that we put together for the intervention in the financial sector I would contend represents a superior effort than that which is taking place now in the US," said Davies, at a public lecture at the University of Technology in Kingston, last week.
Obama inherited an administration in crisis, Davies conceded, but his nearly US$1-trillion dollar stimulus package is inconsistent, bailing out some financial institutions but not others of similar size.
"To date, I have not seen a clearly articulated objective for the intervention in the financial institutions. What you have is knee jerk reactions. Their underestimation is even higher than in Jamaica because everyday you hear of another institution crashing," said Davies.
"One of the problems is the initial commitment of being all things to all persons," he continued.
He argued that the US stimulus package will create a huge fiscal deficit and change the US debt profile for at least a decade.
In Jamaica, Davies argued that his team had explicit objectives of rescuing depositors and nationalising troubled institutions with the clear intention of reselling them. Finsac is the agency that the Government used to intervene in the sector, which cost an estimated $120 billion, or more than a third of GDP. But Davies said US intervention has "no clear exit strategy" to resell these newly nationalised institutions.
The US crisis has engulfed global markets and institutions, and Davies cautioned that Jamaica must not look to the developed world for policy formulations.
"I assert that the technical capacity to develop appropriate policy responses exist nationally, while we will be open to external support and advice from abroad, the lack of clarity and consistency of intervention in the most advanced countries should become a clear demonstration that our tendency to assume that a superior formula exists elsewhere, (is flawed)," argued Davies, who was finance minister from 1994 to 2007.