Puerto Rico in Distress

ABI Analysis

Prices of Puerto Rico bonds suggest that investors are circumspect when its comes to possible progress in a debt exchange of the island’s securities and focusing on whether the commonwealth makes good on $711 million of principal and interest payments coming due, Bloomberg News reported yesterday.

Puerto Rico's Government Development Bank (GDB) on Friday presented some of the island's creditors with more details on a forthcoming plan to consolidate their bonds into a single bond exchange, in a meeting the GDB's president called "very positive and productive,” Reuters reported on Friday.

Top Senate Republicans with jurisdiction over Puerto Rico are working on a legislative proposal to help the commonwealth as it struggles with more than $70 billion of debt, countering a plan by the Obama administration, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The proposed bill will be finished “soon,” Robert Dillon, spokesman for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said yesterday.

Puerto Rico lawmakers approved a bill to establish a local fiscal adjustment board, a key measure in Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla’s plan to lighten the island’s $70 billion debt burden, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The bill now goes before the governor for approval. Details weren’t immediately available.