German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Thursday joked about offering U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to exchange Greece for Puerto Rico. “I offered my friend Jack Lew these days that we could take Puerto Rico into the euro zone if the U.S. were willing to take Greece into the dollar union. He thought that was a joke,” Schaeuble said, according to Bloomberg. Puerto Rico, like Greece, faces a major debt crisis. It has a $73 billion debt, which the island’s governor said on June 28 it will not be able to pay off. Currently, U.S. lawmakers have no plans to aid Puerto Rico, which is a U.S. territory. While Schaeuble intended the remark as a joke, his suggestion reflects the agitation of German government officials with the United States’ involvement in the Greek debt crisis. The United States has remained mostly on the sidelines, but irked European leaders by calling for compromise from both sides, including debt relief for Greece. There are, of course, key differences between the situations faced by Puerto Rico and Greece and their relationship to their currency overlords. Puerto Ricans are eligible for federal economic programs that can cushion some of the fallout from debt-derived economic pain, including unemployment insurance and deposit insurance, as well as Social Security and Medicare. The European Union does not provide Greek citizens with such programs. Schaeuble has taken one of the hardest lines against Greece among officials representing Greece’s creditors. He is widely believed to favor a “Grexit,” or Greek exit from the eurozone. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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