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Puerto Rico’s hurricane damage derails debt repayment plan

Ryan Kailath Dec 12, 2017
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Puerto Rico’s hurricane damage derails debt repayment plan

Ryan Kailath Dec 12, 2017
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Nearly three months after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, recovery is still slowly underway on the island. And underneath it all, one question persists — what to do about the island’s debt. At one point President Donald Trump said it would have to be wiped out … the White House then downplayed that statement. But in a new opinion piece in the Washington Post. a trio of academics, including Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, say they’ve crunched the numbers and that in fact, Puerto Rico has no capacity to make any debt payments in the next 10 years. Which means some kind of debt restructuring or forgiveness may be inevitable. 

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