Business
Jamaica to Greece: Follow our example
Jamaica’s Finance Minister Audley Shaw said Greece should follow the example of the Caribbean nation and restructure the national debt as a first step toward solving its economic crisis.
“Start with that debt exchange,” Shaw said yesterday in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. “We had to do it because we had no alternative.”
Jamaica swapped US$7.8 billion of local bonds for securities with longer maturities and lower interest rates last year as a debt burden exceeding 120 percent of gross domestic product threatened to stall growth in the island nation of 2.8 million people. The accord paved the way for Moody’s Investors Service to raise Jamaica’s credit rating and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to approve a 27-month, US$1.27 billion stand-by credit.