Link

I'm not too keen on economics so I was wondering: is this a "good" or "bad" thing for us FL surfers?

Obviously this is bad for PR and any PR residents, but...

Would this make purchasing land in coastal PR more affordable?

Will they be trying to increase/decrease tourism?

How will this affect airline costs? etc...

Here's the John Oliver segment on PR: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt-mpuR_QHQ

If PR gets destabilized, I don't think it'll be good for anybody. I've heard there are some good breaks in Haiti...but who would ever go with their level of stability?

The surf remains the same.

Originally posted by: Tiptime They said on the news that a 1000 people a day are moving to the Orlando area from PR

That explains all the recent job listings coming out of Orlando with: "Spanish speaking preferred" 

Puerto Rico is looking a bit like Ireland, but without a potato famine.  In the past, tax breaks made the island an excellent place for manufacturing, so there was a big pharmaceutical industry.  The program ended, and the jobs disappeared.  

The Jones Act causes problems, as it also does for Hawai'i and Alaska.  Shipping between US ports has to be by US ships, and a foreign ship can't sail to PR or HI, drop something off, pick something up, then sail to San Diego or Jacksonville.  An additional Jones Act problem is that shippers are supposed to use made-in-USA ships.  This keeps a lot of ancient vessels that should have been scrapped in operation.  Think of the one that sank in a hurricane.  

PR's government also, obviously, managed its finances badly.  One serious mistake is that PR's numerous credit unions are supposed to handle their money very conservatively, so they were encouraged to invest in Commonwealth government agencies.  Fail.  

It does not help that Congressional efforts to stabilize PR's debt crisis are being attacked as a "bailout," allegedly similar to what happened with the auto industry.  It's not, and it might be worth contacting your friendly member of Congress to urge support for Speaker Ryan's bill.  

PR respects property rights in the US legal tradition. 

And yes, the PR influx is changing Orlando.  It's unusual in that PR is the only large part of the United States where English isn't the dominant language (Hawaii's language complexity is a different story).  But in some ways, it's no weirder that the mass movement of people from the Midwest to southern California in the 1950s and 1960s.  

It's on HBO

The Dude Abides.

http://www.rollerphotography.com/

What looks like a good (and free) rundown at Vox.

Huge, but not totally insane.  There were lots of people willing to buy that debt at low interest rates.

Not surfing related really. But sad that the hedge fund people and politicians fucked the islanders so bad. Did u see how they shut down power to the hospitals? jesus christ.

https://www.instagram.com/dj_kaye_/

wow, watched the john oliver bit.  lot of folks getting the shaft by the greedy merkan business ventures. My guess is it does not bode well for the safety of surfers travelling there.

Paywall, but good:  James Surowiecki at the New Yorker.

"Giving an overly indebted entity the legal authority to restructure its debts is not a bailout-it's how American capitalism deals with debt. (Just think of Donald Trump's business career.) Bankruptcy prevents past mistakes from placing an intolerable burden on the future. It also enforces some measure of accountability on lenders who hand too much money to people who have no hope of paying it back."

Dubya-Dubya, are you seeing a New Yorker paywall for post-2006 articles? I'm a sucscriber and I thought only articles before 2006 were paywall'd. 

MAY 2, 2016

On Puerto Rico, Congress Once Again Fails to Do the Obvious

BY JAMES SUROWIECKI

Governor Alejandro García Padilla of Puerto Rico announced that the island could not make a scheduled debt payment, signalling that the territory is on the verge of defaulting on the billions of dollars it owes bondholders.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER GREGORY / BLOOMBERG / GETTY

When Alejandro García Padilla, the governor of Puerto Rico, announced that the island’s Government Development Bank would not pay its creditors an installment that was due on Sunday, he effectively put the territory into partial default. But what he really did was to acknowledge a hard fact: Puerto Rico owes far more money than it can possibly repay, and no one’s interests—least of all its citizens’—are being served by pretending otherwise.

Puerto Rico and its various government entities (like the Development Bank) owe, collectively, debts totalling seventy-two billion dollars, a burden that has almost doubled since 2003. It also has forty-four billion dollars in unfunded pension obligations. The island’s economy has been in recession for almost a decade, its poverty rate is above forty per cent, and it has been steadily losing population to the mainland. What this means is that Puerto Rico can’t keep paying its debts while also delivering a necessary modicum of services to its people.

Congress has been debating, for months, a plan that would give Puerto Rico the power to restructure its debts, but, despite a promise by Paul Ryan that the issue would be resolved by March 31st, representatives don’t seem all that close to a solution. Indeed, on Friday, with the debt-payment deadline looming, members of the House went home for a weeklong recess, leaving the situation unaddressed.

In part, this failure to act reflects disagreement about the details of the rescue plan, and in particular whether it would entail the creation of a fiscal-control board, similar to the one that managed Detroit’s finances after that city declared bankruptcy. The bigger hurdle, though, is that some are calling the prospect of giving Puerto Rico the ability to restructure its debts a “bailout”—a word that has become politically toxic in the aftermath of the financial crisis. A nonprofit group called the Center for Individual Freedom has been running TV ads asking voters to tell Congress not to support a bailout for the island. (The C.I.F. isn’t required to disclose its donors, but the Sunlight Foundation and others have pointed out that its position aligns closely with that of the institutions that own the island’s bonds.) The Heritage Foundation has called the plan a bailout as well, and a number of Republican congressmen have adopted the term.

This is doublespeak. Giving an overly indebted entity the legal authority to restructure its debts is not a bailout—it’s how American capitalism deals with debt. (Just think of Donald Trump’s business career.) Bankruptcy prevents past mistakes from placing an intolerable burden on the future. It also enforces some measure of accountability on lenders who hand too much money to people who have no hope of paying it back.

It’s certainly true that Puerto Rico’s past governments were feckless in their borrowing, and bondholders can also point to a (remarkably dumb) provision in Puerto Rico’s constitution guaranteeing that the central government’s debt be paid back before the territory spends money on anything else. But neither of those arguments makes Puerto Rico any more solvent. The island simply doesn’t have the money to repay its debts, and it’s absurd and politically untenable to expect Puerto Ricans to labor solely, in effect, to pay off bondholders. Bad debts are the result of poor decisions by both borrowers and lenders. Bankruptcy insures that both sides bear the costs of those decisions.

Of course, letting Puerto Rico restructure its debts would only be the first step toward extracting the island from its current hole. There’s also the not insignificant problem of figuring out how to revive its economy (something I wrote about last year). But first things first. If Congress wants to avoid a real bailout, with taxpayer money going to bondholders, it needs to stop dragging its feet and let Puerto Rico begin to write down its debt.