In an interview with Fox News, President Donald Trump said that Puerto Rico’s debt will have to wiped out.

“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is you can wave goodbye to that,” Trump said on Tuesday in an interview with Fox News, according to a Reuters report.

Trump visited the island on Tuesday, two weeks after Maria destroyed Puerto Rico’s entire infrastructure system, leaving nearly 3.5 million residents without power, and tens of thousands without clean water.

The official death toll more than doubled to 34, a spokesman for Governor Ricardo Rosello said on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

Even before the storm brought Puerto Rico to a near standstill, the government there already struggled with an economy in shambles and a default on billions of dollars of public debt.

Today, the U.S. territory has nearly $70 billion in debt, an unemployment rate 2.5 times the U.S. average, a 45 percent poverty rate, nearly insolvent pension systems and a chronically underfunded Medicaid insurance program for the poor.

Puerto Rico’s job base continues to shrink, taking its economy along with it. Since the recession ended, a lack of job prospects has sent many Puerto Ricans fleeing to the mainland, where the job market is much stronger.

During Trump’s visit on Tuesday he said that responding to the hurricane’s devastation had thrown the federal budget “out of whack,” but he praised officials and first responders for preventing the storm from becoming a “real catastrophe” like Hurricane Katrina.

—Reuters and CNBC’s Christina Wilke and John W. Schoen contributed to this article.

Source: cnbc china
Trump says Puerto Rico's debt will have to be wiped out