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El Salvador pays off $800m in debt, Nayib Bukele denounces “lying media

by Thomas

Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, revealed via Twitter that the Central American country had managed to pay off its $800 million bond debt plus interest. He also pointed to the lack of media coverage of the transaction, adding that the same media was prone to vigorous criticism of El Salvador’s financial stability.

El Salvador manages to pay off its debts

On Twitter, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced that his government had repaid $800 million in bond debt maturing the same day, with interest.

In the same tweet, Nayib Bukele expressed regret over the lack of media coverage of the news as the same media, which he described as liars, wrote “hundreds of articles” questioning the country’s financial stability because of its adoption of Bitcoin (BTC) in September 2021.

Over the past year, almost every mainstream international media outlet has said that because of our “Bitcoin bet”, El Salvador will default on its debt by January 2023 (since we had an $800 million bond maturing today). Literally, hundreds of articles. “

El Salvador’s president took particular aim at the New York Times, which headlined, “El Salvador’s Big Bet on Bitcoin Doesn’t Pay Off”:

“Full pages in the New York Times and everything else, creating the narrative that El Salvador was broke and was going to default. I denounced them at the time, but of course, who was going to believe us and not all the international media and their “economic geniuses”? “

The historically hostile media in El Salvador

On September 15, the international financial rating agency Fitch Ratings downgraded El Salvador from “CCC” to “CC”, reflecting a liquidity situation considered disastrous. At the time, the agency said that El Salvador needed to pay off the $800 million in bond debt to get out of its predicament, which it has now done.

A few months earlier, in July 2022, Nayib Bukele said that the country had ample liquidity to meet its needs:

“Contrary to what the media has been saying all this time, El Salvador has the cash to not only pay all its liabilities when due, but also to buy all its own debt in advance (until 2025). “

According to available data, El Salvador currently has 2,381 BTC, which is equivalent to approximately $53.6 million at current market prices. Although the adoption of Bitcoin within the country is not necessarily unanimous, President Nayib Bukele has significant public support.

He was elected on a conservative, anti-crime platform in the previous elections. A programme that seems to have borne fruit, with 85% of the population supporting him according to a poll by the independent CID Gallup institute

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