I’ve spent the first half of the year building. A new company, a roster of clients, and a new way of working, and now I’m bringing you along for the ride.

I’m Rabs, but you probably already know that. If you’re receiving this email it’s because we’ve perhaps worked together, whether that’s been in the newsroom, radio, TV, or my agency work. If not, hi. Nice to meet you. Here are the cliff notes. I’m 20 years into Bahamian media and creative work. In October of last year I left the agency and started Media & Margins. A strategic comms and creative direction consultancy for brands and organizations that care about the story they’re telling. The thesis is simple. The story is always the strategy. The real story usually lives in the margins.

This newsletter is part of how I’m building my business in public. Every other Friday at 7am you’ll get one national story that really stuck with me, one brand move worth studying, one look inside the work, and a shortlist of things I think are worth your attention.

Hit reply if you love it. Simply unsubscribe if you don’t. I promise I won’t take it personally.

Either way, happy to have you here.

The pre-budget conversation in the papers laid out the headline numbers, with the Nassau Guardian’s Executive Editor Candia Dames reporting on the 3.8 percent growth and Rachel Scott reporting that the government was on track to hit its projected surplus. The growth itself didn’t come from where regular people actually spend money. Wholesale and retail trade, the sector closest to everyday life, actually shrank last year, and household spending barely moved. What grew instead was tourism, finance, and government spending, so the economy got bigger but the part of it that shows up at the cash register and in your wallet got smaller. Halkitis acknowledged the gap himself when he said the growth has to be “felt more broadly,” which is the line politicians have been saying my entire career.

So when Minister Halkitis stood up on May 27 to deliver the newly re-elected Davis administration’s second-term budget, themed A Budget That Builds On Progress, the question I really wanted answered going into the communication was whether this thing actually addresses the gap or just paints over it.

The budget did do some good things. VAT came off uncooked food back in April, the standard rate dropped from 12 to 10, first-time homeowner relief expanded to cover multi-unit homes like duplexes and triplexes and fourplexes (which matters here where multi-unit homes are how a lot of families actually live), and duties came down on household plastics, paper goods, and sanitary products. Those count.

But the bigger question, the one Halkitis raised himself when he said the growth has to be felt more broadly, didn’t get an answer inside the document. The closest he came was a sentence promising the administration would “ensure that growth reaches more homes, more businesses, more communities, and more islands,” which is effectively the same line in a fresh font, because it still doesn’t say how, when, or to whom first.

On the arrears front, the budget said nothing at all. The government currently owes $241 million in unpaid invoices to vendors and contractors who already did the work, a figure that nearly doubled from $121 million the year before, and a budget communication that ran for hours never gave it a paragraph. Opposition Leader Michael Pintard had the cleanest read in the room when he said a surplus built on unpaid obligations is a sign of delay and deferral, which is the part of the budget I would have wanted Halkitis to acknowledge from the stage, and he didn’t.

There was also a question about the math itself. The current fiscal year, ending June 30, was supposed to close with a $75 million surplus, and at the midyear point the government was sitting on a $342 million deficit, which means they need to close almost $400 million in six months to land where they said they would. Halkitis said in the communication that they should still achieve the surplus, but he didn’t give a dollar figure for how close, and he didn’t explain how the gap actually gets closed. The new fiscal year that begins July 1 projects a $223.1 million surplus, which is itself lower than what the 2025 Fiscal Strategy Report had previously forecast, and the IMF’s projection for the country’s overall growth in 2026 has now slipped to 2.1 percent, which means the year being celebrated is the high water mark and the growth being defended is what the country is moving down from rather than up toward.

My own answer to that question sits somewhere in the middle. I’m not at the bottom of this, but I’m not at the top of my field either, and I know exactly what’s keeping me there. The harder thing to say out loud is that the middle isn’t where this story ends. Plenty of people are sitting where I’m not, doing the math with less to work with, and getting less back from a system that keeps telling them it’s growing.

What I actually want to know is the last time you felt prosperous in this country, not on a GDP chart but in your life, with the bills paid, the groceries done, the kids settled, a little put aside, and a little for yourself.

The budget tells you how the government says the country is doing, and the cash register tells you how the country is actually doing. When those two stop matching, the country has already told you the real story.

They didn’t compete with Hallmark. They opened a category Hallmark literally can’t enter.

And the bigger pattern, because Da BBC Project isn’t the only one doing this: the Caribbean brands working right now are the ones treating Caribbean-ness as their competitive advantage instead of an obstacle to overcome. Used to be that the play was to make local brands look international. Now the play is leaning all the way in to specificity. Dialect. Holidays renamed. Real people. Cultural references the diaspora gets immediately and tourists have to work to understand.

See their cards on Instagram.