A rule of thumb in determining the likely success of a finance minister is that the person who has the job is believed to have sound judgement and is seen to be credible.

For, as any person - well, almost any - who has occupied such a post or follow, these things would know, markets, by and large, turn on confidence, starting with a belief in technical competence and in an ability to arrive at nuanced, but firm decisions. There is assumed to be in that person, appropriate discretion when necessary, but an absence of prevarication. He or she, to put it bluntly, must be believable.

Audley Shaw, Jamaica's finance minister, if he is not careful, may be lurching, eyes wide open, into a crisis of credibility. Two issues give serious cause for concern.

It is assumed that when a minister of finance takes to Parliament a budget, he assumes ownership of the projections therein, including the underlying assumptions and analyses on which those predictions are made. The minister, after all, is no mere messenger for his technocrats.

Data soundness

If anything, it is the other way around. It is they, the technocrats, who have to convince the minister of the soundness of the data and the likely efficacy of the policy prescriptions. If he is so convinced and adopts their recommendations, they become his own, to be so declared on behalf of the government of which he is a part.

Which is what made Mr Shaw's recent intervention in Parliament on the state of the Jamaican economy in the face of the global credit crisis, so fundamentally worrying. When Mr Shaw went to Parliament last April with his $489 billion budget, he projected inflation of no more than nine per cent and expected growth as high as 3.5 per cent.

He did not appear in the House of Representatives as a messenger; neither did he parse the data nor suggest that they were flawed so he could have no faith in them. They were what they were, and they were his.

But last week, Mr Shaw sought to extricate himself from responsibility for an inflation rate that is now projected to end the fiscal year at twice what was originally predicted, and shamelessly dump the blame for being "overly optimistic" on the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ).

Overambitious

"To put it mildly, they were somewhat overambitious," he said.

So what of his own technocrats at the finance ministry, or other agencies? Did he just accept, without any rigorous testing, the assumptions provided by the central bank?

The fact, of course, is that the global circumstances, some of which he could not have anticipated, changed on Mr Shaw. That should have been easy to admit rather than seeking to dump on the BOJ in a farcical game of non-sticking Teflon.

Then, there is Mr Shaw's quarrel with the contractor general, Greg Christie, over the Government's decision to remove Air Jamaica, Petrojam, the Jamaica Tourist Board and Jamaica Vacations from coverage of the State's procurement guidelines.

There may be good commercial reasons for the decision. They, however, have to be made with sound reason, rather than noise, especially by a man who sold himself as a warrior against corruption, but is in danger of being perceived as a poor caricature of Don Quixote.

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