No central bank, and a debt restructuring under federal oversight

Puerto Rico uses the US dollar and has no central bank of its own, so interest rates and the money supply are set by the Federal Reserve for the whole United States. That removes the exchange-rate tools other indebted territories use, which mattered when the island's public debt, more than 70 billion dollars, became unpayable after years of slow growth and population decline. In June 2016 Congress passed PROMESA, creating a federal oversight board with authority over the budget and a court-supervised process to restructure debt. A formal restructuring of general-obligation and other bonds was filed in 2017 and settled through a plan approved in 2022. Hurricane Maria in September 2017 then deepened the contraction visible in the island's output charts, and reconstruction funding and federal transfers shaped the recovery that followed, rather than any local monetary response.