Bloomberg-Quint
Trump Wants Puerto Rico Debt Handled in Court, Not Wiped Out
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump wants Puerto Rico’s $74 billion debt to be addressed through the bankruptcy process established under a law passed last year, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, not eliminated, as he suggested in a television interview.
“There’s a process for how to deal with Puerto Rico’s debt. It will have to go through that process to have a lasting recovery and growth. This is a process that was put in place and set up under Obama,” Sanders told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “The president wants it to go through that process, and that’s the stage we’re at on that.”
Her remarks were another attempt by administration officials to clarify Trump’s intentions regarding the territory’s debt after he rattled the $3.8 trillion municipal bond market on Tuesday with an interview suggesting he wanted the debt eliminated.
“We have to look at their whole debt structure,” Trump said in a Fox News interview. “They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street. We’re going to have to wipe that out. That’s going to have to be -- you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.”
White House officials quickly sought to walk back the statement. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, said Wednesday morning -- as Puerto Rico’s bond prices sunk to a record low -- not to take Trump literally.
“I think what you heard the president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt problem,” Mulvaney said.
The price of Puerto Rico bonds rallied after Mulvaney’s comments and were little-changed on Thursday, steadying after the rout triggered by Trump’s remarks. Its general-obligation bonds due in 2035, one of the most actively traded securities, changed hands for about 38 cents on the dollar, roughly where the price closed on Wednesday.