Puerto Rico threatened by vulture funds

This 6 February 2019 video says about itself:

A federal judge has approved a plan for Puerto Rico to restructure a portion of its debt which would require Puerto Rico to pay $32 billion over 40 years. Critics say the deal will allow vulture funds to make huge profits by buying up those debts.

Several of those vulture funds include public employee pension funds and the investment funds of Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who held a hearing on the proposed deal last month, echoed critics’ concerns about Puerto Rico’s ability to make the payments and the likely effects on public services. However, she said in her decision, “[T]he Court is not free to impose its own view of what the optimal resolution of the dispute could have been.”

Hurricane Maria hit the island of Puerto Rico on 20 September 2017 and triggered more than 40,000 landslides in at least three-fourths of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities. In a new article from GSA Today, authors Erin Bessette-Kirton and colleagues write that “the number of landslides that occurred during this event was two orders of magnitude greater than those reported from previous hurricanes”: here.

FEMA CHIEF TO STEP DOWN Brock Long, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will step down. Long, who has come under intense scrutiny for his response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and personal use of government funds, said he was leaving to focus on his family. [HuffPost]