Nick Timiraos writes: With the Puerto Rican economy in decline, Luis Acevedo, a 31-year-old chemist, decided to get a degree in chemical engineering to give him a better chance at boosting his earnings. Even with the degree, he has had no luck finding a job after five months, and he said competition is fierce given a high unemployment rate, about 12%. “The way things are going I’m starting to apply abroad,” Mr. Acevedo said.

Weak job prospects have prompted Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, to seek employment in places like Florida, New York and New Jersey. Since 2000, total employment is down 11% in Puerto Rico, while it is 7% higher in the U.S. The island was projected to post one of the largest population declines in the world last year, according to U.S. government figures.

More than 27% of Puerto Ricans between 15 and 24 years old who were in the labor force were unemployed in 2013, compared to nearly 16% in the U.S.
Andrew Bary of Barron’s tells Jack Otter what just happened in San Juan, and what it means for municipal bond investors.

Labor unions on the mainland pushed for the federal minimum wage to cover Puerto Rico in the 1970s amid concerns that the island would create low-wage competition for mainland jobs. The move eliminated a comparative economic advantage for the island, while tax breaks designed to lure multinationals did little to establish permanent job growth, said Barry Bosworth, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Congress mandated two U.S. territories in the Pacific, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, to increase their minimum wages in 2007 by 50 cents annually until meeting the federal level this year, but it delayed those increases in 2010 amid concerns about economic growth.

“They are begging the government to stop the onwards march of raising the minimum wage,” said Mr. Porzecanski. “It’s better to be hired at $5 than not to be hired at $7.25.” Minimum wages in American Samoa, which range from $4.18 to $4.76 an hour, are set to rise by 50 cents at the end of September.

Labor dynamics are only part of the problem with Puerto Rico’s economy, which also faces poor business investment, high tax evasion, and unusually expensive electricity and other costs of living.

The Jones Act, a law that requires most shipping between U.S. ports to rely on a small and specific fleet of U.S.-flagged vessels, means that just a handful of ships serve Puerto Rico, limiting competition and increasing costs of basic goods. The Krueger Report recommends that Congress exempt Puerto Rico from the Jones Act, following similar exemptions for the U.S. Virgin Islands.

In Puerto Rico, broad use of government benefit programs have further damped workforce participation. Transfer payments, such as food stamps and disability benefits, account for roughly 40% of personal income in Puerto Rico, double the share on the U.S. mainland, according to the New York Fed.

Those payments tend to be generous relative to local incomes because payments are indexed to conditions on the mainland. Moreover, because they decline as wages rise, they can create a disincentive to work. The Krueger report recommends providing lower benefit payments to a larger number of people, which would maintain the social safety net while encouraging more labor-force participation.

At the same time, economists say other local labor laws, including more generous overtime pay and vacation rules, plus laws that make it harder to fire workers, have made employers reluctant to hire.

While it would make sense to exempt Puerto Rico from future increases in the federal minimum wage, cutting wages “will just accelerate the exit from the island,” Mr. Bosworth said. “The fundamental problem in Puerto Rico is the lack of jobs.

The Econmist editorializes:   European Union has never seen the like of the past eight days in Greece: barred banks, capital controls, the first IMF default by a developed country, the collapse of a multi-billion-euro bail-out, plans for a referendum that may hasten Greece’s ejection from the single currency, and the beggary of the people. Were the stakes not so high, all those emergency summits and last-minute demands would count as farce.

Instead it is a tragedy, where an outcome that all sides say they do not want—Greece’s exit from the euro—seems increasingly likely. The chaos is evidence that leaving the euro would be disastrous for Greece, not least because modest gains from default and devaluation would be overwhelmed by political and economic instability. For the rest of Europe, too, “Grexit” has well-rehearsed risks, notably that of a failing state on the continent’s south-eastern flank. But as the drama has become more desperate, so Europeans seem less worried. They take comfort from the fact that Greece is uniquely dysfunctional. Game-playing and repeated miscalculation have poisoned the negotiations (see article). Without Greece, many now conclude, the euro zone might actually be more stable.    Facing up to the Euros Contradictions

Joshua Keating writes:  If you want some perspective on Europe’s current debt crisis, consider the fact that Chinese stocks have fallen by a value 10 times Greece’s entire GDP, with nary a peep from the Greek-obsessed international media..

But even if the scale of Greece’s woes seem small by Chinese standards, Beijing is still concerned with what happens this weekend, particularly due to concerns that if the situation isn’t resolved, it could drag down economies throughout the EU, China’s largest trading partner. By coincidence, Prime Minister Le Keqiang was in Brussels this week for an annual China-EU summit and said that China is hoping for a resolution that keeps Greece within the eurozone, saying it concerns not just Europe but “world financial stability and economic recovery.”

Still, the prospect of a Greek exit from Europe and a collapse of the bailout has led to some speculation about whether China could turn the situation to its advantage. China has leant money to countries that have defaulted on their debts before, notably in Latin America, and it may see a political advantage in stepping in when Europe failed to.

If history is a guide, China would be less interested than the EU in reforming Greece’s governance and domestic economic policies, so long as Greece committed to policies that provide advantages for Chinese trade and, perhaps, a reliably pro-China foreign policy.

There’s been even more speculation about the prospect of Russia stepping in to bail Greece out. The Kremlin has helped out debt-addled the Mediterranean before, granting a 2.5 billion euro emergency loan to Cyprus in 2011.

Greece’s ruling Syriza party is fairly pro-Russian, opposing EU sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s government.

The Russians have left open the possibility of further economic cooperation in exchange for concessions to Russian business. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said back in January that Russia would “definitely consider” a Greek request for aid.

Despite these hints, a Russian lifeline for Greece is probably still unlikely. Battered by both low oil prices and western economic sanctions, Russia is burning through its reserves fast without much relief in sight.

It would be a mistake for Greece’s government to count on help from Russia (or China for that matter) if things take a turn for the worse with Europe. But it’s probably still advantageous for Greece and Russia if the lenders in Brussels think it’s a possibility.

George Friedman writes: The Greek situation – having perhaps outlived the term “crisis,” now that it has taken so long to unfold – appears to have finally reached its terminal point. This is, of course, an illusion: It has been at its terminal point for a long time.

The terminal point is the juncture where neither the Greeks nor the Germans can make any more concessions. In Greece itself, the terminal point is long past. Unemployment is at 26 percent, and more than 50 percent of youths under 25 are unemployed. Slashed wages, particularly in the state sector, affecting professions including physicians and engineers, have led to massive underemployment. Meanwhile, most new economic activity is occurring in the untaxable illegal markets. The Greeks owe money to EU institutions and the International Monetary Fund, all of which acquired bad Greek debts from banks that initially lent funds to Greece in order to stabilize its banking sector. No one ever really thought the Greeks could pay back these loans.

The problem is simple. The core institutions of the European Union have functioned not as adjudicators but as collection agents, and the Greeks have learned how ruthless those agents can be when aided by collaborative governments like Cyprus. The rest of the Europeans have also realized as much, which is why Euroskeptic parties are on the rise across the union. Germany, the country most threatened by growing anti-EU sentiment, wants to make clear that debtors face a high price for defiance. And if resistance is confined to Greece, the Germans will have succeeded. But if resistance spreads to other countries, the revolt of the debtor states against the union will cause major problems for Germany, threatening the economic powerhouse’s relationship with the rest of Europe.  After the Greek Crisis

Brandon Park, the 28,100-acre former estate of William A. Rockefeller, Jr. (a co-founder of Standard Oil with his brother John D. Rockefeller), has been purchased by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma of China for $23 million according to the Wall Street Journal.

Alibaba is the world’s largest e-commerce company. He reportedly bought the property principally for conservation purposes, but may also use it as a personal retreat.  Ma is chairman of the China board of the Nature Conservancy and is a member of the global board. The Nature Conservancy introduced Ma to the property, according to The Wall Street Journal.  Ma has extensive experience in conservation projects in China, including co-founding the Sichuan Nature Conservation Foundation and the Laohegou Nature Reserve in Sichuan, which protects giant panda habitat and is the first protected area managed by a non-governmental organization in China.  This is his first conservation project outside of China.

Frances Coppola writes:  The creditors have once more rejected Greece’s proposal and put forward their own version including tax and pension changes that Greece had already said it would not accept.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, June 27^th, the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced that the people of Greece would be asked to decide whether they wished to accept the creditors’ proposal. A referendum will be held on July 5^th.

The question that will be put to the Greek people is only about the creditors’ proposal, not about Greece’s membership of the Euro. But this referendum has huge historical and emotional resonances, deliberately created by the Greek government in a manner reminiscent of Alex Salmond’s linking of the Scottish independence referendum to the historic victory of the Scots over the English in 1314.   Similarly, Tsipras’s subtle attempt to link this referendum to Greece’s rejection of Benito Mussolini’s ultimatum in October 1940 may not be enough to overcome Greek fears.

But the creditor side and the world’s media quickly decided that the referendum was actually about Euro membership. A “No” vote would result in Greek exit from the Eurozone. A “Yes” vote would mean the fall of the Syriza government. Not surprisingly, the Greek opposition parties called for a “Yes” vote.

A press release says that this proposal was under discussion until the Greeks walked out:

Discussions on this text were ongoing with the Greek authorities on Friday night in view of the Eurogroup of 27 June 2015. The understanding of all parties involved was that this Eurogroup meeting should achieve a comprehensive deal for Greece, one that would have included not just the measures to be jointly agreed, but would also have addressed future financing needs and the sustainability of the Greek debt. It also included support for a Commission-led package for a new start for jobs and growth in Greece, boosting recovery of and investment in the real economy, which was discussed and endorsed by the College of Commissioners on Wednesday 24 June 2015.

However, neither this latest version of the document, nor an outline of a comprehensive deal could be formally finalised and presented to the Eurogroup due to the unilateral decision of the Greek authorities to abandon the process on the evening of 26 June 2015.

European stocks started the day with losses of 4% or more as investors reflected on the weekend news from Greece: of the planned referendum, bank closures and capital controls. The Portuguese stockmarket was one of the worst affected, falling almost 6% at the open on fears that the economy would be dragged into the crisis (the Athens stock exchange is closed).

Contagion was seen in the bond markets too, with Spanish and Italian 10-year bond yields rising around 18 basis points, while the German equivalent fell 15 points; a spread widening of around a third of a percentage point. The euro was slighly lower on the news, falling less than 1% against the dollar. While uncertainty over Greece’s future is bad news for the European economy, traders had been using the euro as the basis for a “carry trade”; borrowing euros and investing the proceeds in higher-yielding risky assets. As those traders pulled back from their risky bets, they would have paid back the euros they borrowed, limiting the currency’s fall.

Traders had three other factors to consider, which might limit losses as the day proceeds. The European Central Bank could step into the market to buy bonds, particularly in places like Portugal, Spain and Italy, and limit the contagion. In addition, a yes vote in the Greek referendum might lead to a deal with creditors, and might see the departure of a Syriza-led government. And then there is the sheer chaos in Greece, which has ended up in the situation all other governments bent over backwards to avoid in 2008—its ATMs running out of money. Some commentators believe the referendum, which asks voters to approve a deal which will not even be on the table by July 5th, may yet be called off.