The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico has been an unincorporated U.S. territory since the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1898. Typically, when Puerto Rico is in the news, it is because the island wishes to become our 51st state. But in the past few years, another kind of news has been developing — massive debt.
For more than a year, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has struggled with a debt of over $70 billion. To put that in context, their annual gross domestic product was $103 billion in 2013. This debt crisis reached an inflection point in July 2016 when the commonwealth defaulted on its debt.
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