Guyana’s USD crisis: When Government Control Chokes a Free Market

Oct 30, 2025 Letters

Dear Editor,

Guyana is being hailed around the world as the fastest-growing economy, yet on the ground, businesses are gasping for breath. For months, the country has faced a crippling shortage of U.S. dollars—so severe that some importers can’t pay suppliers, investors can’t repatriate profits, and ordinary citizens are left wondering how an economy flush with oil wealth could be starved of foreign exchange. This is not just an inconvenience—it’s a failure of management, transparency, and basic economic principles.

Let us call it what it is: the government has mismanaged the entire foreign exchange market. By injecting itself into the system, dictating access, and turning what should be a free market mechanism into a controlled and manipulated structure, the authorities have set the stage for chaos. The recent measures implemented by government to alleviate the challenges instead exacerbated the burden. The Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Guyana have been silent for far too long, while availability became a scarcity, rate fluctuations grow sharper and confidence collapses.

This resulted in a manufactured and manipulated two-tiered system. Banks are constrained by central directives, while non-bank cambios and street dealers exploit the vacuum, hiking spreads and engaging in price gouging with impunity. This manipulation—disguised as “foreign exchange management”—has distorted supply and demand so thoroughly that Guyana’s dollar exchange rate now dances to political rhythm rather than market logic.

In a free market economy, no government, nor the banking system should be picking winners and losers in access to foreign currency. Yet that appears to be exactly what is happening. Key projects and government-linked entities seem to have ready access to USD for procurement and imports, while private businesses are left scrambling. The authorities’ silence only fuels suspicion that the state has redirected hard currency to finance its own priorities, starving the private sector in the process.

The implications are devastating. Businesses on the brink of collapse, layoffs looming, import pipelines drying up, and local production shrinking—all because the government refuses to allow the market to function freely. Investors who once saw Guyana as a promising frontier now talk of trapped profits and unpredictable conditions. No serious investor wants to operate where monetary policy feels like a moving target.

A government that prides itself on growth cannot pretend that manipulation and opacity are tools of progress. Economic expansion built on control rather than competition is a façade—one that will crumble under the weight of poor governance if these practices continue. Transparency, accountability, and a return to open market operations must happen now. Guyana deserves to be more than an oil-rich headline. It deserves a genuinely free economy where businesses can trade, investors can predict and plan, and citizens can trust that the system is fair. Development cannot coexist with currency rationing and selective control. The government must come clean, restore transparency, and stop playing puppeteer with the nation’s financial stability—before confidence, and the economy itself, collapse beyond repair.

Sincerely,
Hemdutt Kumar

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Free Market, Hemdutt Kumar, U.S. dollars, USD crisis

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