Orrin Hatch: “Now, Mr. President, before the Senate adjourns for the year, I want to speak once again on Puerto Rico's financial and…”

“Now, Mr. President, before the Senate adjourns for the year, I want to speak once again on Puerto Rico's financial and economic challenges. Yesterday, we heard frustration from a number of my friends on the other side of the aisle about the fact that the end- of-the-year legislative vehicles did not include any changes in bankruptcy law to make Puerto Rico eligible for chapter 9 and to allow those to protections to be retroactively applied to its debts. Sadly, we also heard a number of misrepresentations, false claims, and statements that effectively impugn Republican motives as we are working to address the Puerto Rican challenges. Boiling it all down, some of my friends on the other side of the aisle argued that Republicans are somehow holding up retroactive chapter 9 eligibility for Puerto Rico in order to protect interests of ``hedge funds''--of all things. To back that claim, loose numbers, apparently drawn from some kind of random number generator were put forward, claiming that hedge funds hold maybe anywhere between 15 to perhaps 50 percent of Puerto Rico's outstanding debt of over $73 billion. Conveniently, they did not go into great lengths to define the term ``hedge funds,'' making it pretty easy to throw numbers around without a clear link to any real discernable facts.…”