We Screwed Up Detroit. Now It's Puerto Rico's Turn

In Puerto Rico, so far, this year’s hurricane season hasn’t seemed bad. Dorian grazed the island but unleashed the bulk of its furies elsewhere. The same cannot be said of the financial lashings that Puerto Ricans have been weathering.

Earlier this fall, after over a decade in recession and more than four years since a declaration that Puerto Rico could not pay its bills, a federal oversight board disclosed a plan for restructuring the island’s debt. Two years earlier, the board had entered the island into a new, bankruptcy-like process to restructure nine times the amount of liabilities that Detroit reported when it filed for bankruptcy. The plan for Puerto Rico would reduce a third of the debt; it still requires a creditor vote and court approval.

I spent the last three and a half years studying the impact of Detroit’s bankruptcy on its residents.

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