Thursday, October 22, 2015

Obama to bail out the Kanosians

Obama Administration Draws Up Plan to Help Puerto Rico With Debt
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH, MICHAEL CORKERY and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS
OCT. 21, 2015
Looking for a way to help debt-ridden Puerto Rico, administration officials on Wednesday proposed an ambitious — if politically perilous — plan that stops short of a direct federal bailout but that its backers hope is sweeping enough to keep the island from becoming America’s Greece.
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The plan would create a new territorial bankruptcy regime and impose new fiscal oversight on Puerto Rico, which is mired in the depths of a decade-long recession, running out of cash and struggling to make payments on $72 billion of debt. It represents an urgent bid by President Obama to offer a way forward. But it requires cooperation from a Republican-led Congress bent on imposing spending restraint.
In describing the package on Wednesday, administration officials emphasized that they had exhausted the limits of their own authority to help Puerto Rico, and needed quick action by Congress to avoid a catastrophe.
“Administrative actions cannot solve the crisis,” Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, said in a joint statement with Jeffrey D. Zients, the National Economic Council director, and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the health and human services secretary.
First Puerto Rico then Illinois and New York.  California is last.

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