Puerto Rico financial pinch stirs talk of moving

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – In historic Old San Juan, in the soft light of an early morning, a group of university students gathered to take photographs.

There was no shortage of subjects. A young man stood with large iguanas crawling up his arms and across his shoulders, waiting for tourists to snap his picture and pay him a dollar or two. An elderly man, his worn shoes held together with fraying Velcro strips, swept leaves into a dustpan as more swirled to the ground in the salty sea breeze.

But the students, all of them American citizens by virtue of their birth in this U.S. territory, did not reach for their cameras. Instead, they were absorbed in a spirited debate about the future, and their vision did not bode well for Puerto Rico. Each of them planned to leave the island, discouraged by an economic situation whose grim state was illuminated with the governor’s warning on June 29 that Puerto Rico was running out of money to pay its $72 billion debt.

“The economy is just on the floor,” said Alejandro Cardona, 19, part of the photography class from the University of Puerto Rico in Bayamon, near San Juan, the capital. “There is going to be less money and fewer jobs. I want to start my own company, but here, I don’t think I can do it.”

Many Puerto Ricans will tell you that it is hard to dream big on the island, especially in light of Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla’s televised announcement about the financial crisis. It came after the release of a government-commissioned report by an independent team of financial experts, who used words like “dire” and “unsustainable” to describe Puerto Rico’s economic footing.

“Crisis looms,” they said, despite recent local government measures such as higher taxes – the sales and use tax increased from 7 percent to 11.5 percent as of July 1 – pension reforms and spending cuts.

Experts offer various reasons for Puerto Rico’s slide. They include decades of poor fiscal management, failure to build up the tourism industry to its full potential, an oil-dependent energy sector and the phasing out in 2006 of IRS tax incentives offered to U.S. companies operating on the island. That led to job losses when firms moved elsewhere.

Through it all, successive administrations piled on debt by selling more bonds to pay the bills.

The report noted that despite its year-round warm climate and proximity to the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico’s tourism numbers are lower than they were a decade ago, and the number of hotel rooms remains about what it was in the 1970s. San Juan’s leaders consistently overestimated anticipated revenue by about $1.5 billion a year, the report said.

It also criticized Puerto Rico’s labor practices in the private and the public sector, noting in particular that it has 10 percent more teachers than a decade ago despite having 40 percent fewer students, and employment rules that discourage hiring. Those rules include a mandatory Christmas bonus for most workers and generous overtime and vacation rules compared with mainland employers.

The 26-page report, whose chief author, Anne Krueger, is a former World Bank chief economist, recommended a variety of fixes, including reducing the dependence on imported oil; cutting wages to reduce labor costs; and revamping labor laws to encourage hiring, thereby reducing the 12.2 percent unemployment rate and alleviating the 41 percent poverty rate.

It also called for debt restructuring, which would require cooperation from hedge funds that turned to Puerto Rico expecting big gains, and for a change to the U.S. law that bars Puerto Rico from filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Because it is not a U.S. state, Puerto Rico cannot access the federal bankruptcy law that Detroit turned to when it hit rock bottom. It also has no access to emergency funding from the International Monetary Fund or other institutions that step in to save flailing countries, because it is not an independent nation.

“In this way, Puerto Rico is stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Eric LeCompte, an adviser to the United Nations on global development and debt relief and the executive director of the Jubilee USA Network. The faith-based organization lobbies for debt relief for developing countries.

Americans eagerly bought up the tax-exempt bonds, which offered higher returns than U.S. Treasuries. The mutual fund research firm Morningstar said that as of the end of June, U.S. bond funds had $11.3 billion in Puerto Rican debt, so the island’s inability to make payments on its bonds would hit American investors in the pocketbook. Hedge funds and individual American investors held billions more in Puerto Rican debt, the firm said.

Whatever changes are made, though, would take years to generate a substantial recovery. In the meantime, more Puerto Ricans will leave, reducing the island’s tax base and the labor force needed to fuel the economy.