Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla has signed an overhaul of the U.S. territory's cash-short public pension fund into law, after it was passed by lawmakers late on Thursday in a bid to soothe investors and shore up the country's sputtering economy.
"This has not been a simple process," Garcia Padilla said as he enacted the legislation on Thursday night that had been bitterly opposed by labor unions.
"It has been a topic that has been avoided for the past 60 years. No administration has taken the responsibility of reforming the retirement system," the governor said.
Officials said the overhaul, of the notoriously weak and underfunded public pension system, was a crucial step to avoid a potentially devastating credit downgrade.
"No retirement system in the world is as broken as ours," Senate President Eduardo Bhatia said on Thursday, before the overhaul legislation was approved by both houses of the Caribbean island's legislature.
All three major credit ratings firms have recently downgraded Puerto Rico's bond ratings to just above junk-bond status, pointing to widening budget deficits as the island struggles to emerge from a five-year recession that has pushed unemployment to nearly 15 percent.
The Caribbean island is a leading borrower in the $3.7 trillion U.S. municipal bond market. Any further downgrade by rating agencies would sharply increase the cost of borrowing for Puerto Rico, which needs to be able to issue bonds at attractive rates to meet pressing short-term financing needs.
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