Bloomberg: Puerto Rico Is Running Out of Money
* Before tackling a $74 billion debt, a liquidity crisis looms
* If Congress doesn’t send money, ‘it will be a disaster’
Puerto Rico faces a government shutdown on Oct. 31, including halting its hurricane recovery, if Congress doesn’t provide billions in emergency funds, said Treasury Secretary Raul Maldonado.
The U.S. commonwealth’s bankrupt government is burning through the $1.6 billion it had on hand before Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, destroying decayed infrastructure and killing 34 people. With widespread damage to telecommunications systems and the electricity grid, Maldonado doesn’t expect to begin collecting sales tax for at least another month, he said Wednesday.
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WNU Editor: Puerto Rico's past behavior on how it treated its finances/debts/etc. has caught up to it with the disaster that Hurricane Maria has brought. This is not going to be an easy fix, and I wonder if Puerto Rico will change once it does receive its bailout.
1 comment:
have you done an audit of the Puerto Rican debt? I'd be willing to bet that if such an audit were done, it would find out that much of it is fake. Fakery is how Wall Street operates, afterall. They've done it to many American cities, such as Detroit and Birmingham to name but two. They pile the debt on and then demand austerity in the city budgets in order to service the debt (I almost write "pay off," but Wall Street never wants it paid off, they want to collect the interest payments for ever), and so the city can never make the investments that would actually lay the basis for economic growth. Time for a new system, specifically, the system of national credit that was designed by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790's.
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