Panama has gone from a pattern of sustainable growth to a habit of debt, which like other nations that have done the same, rarely ends with cuts in government spending to match the reductions in revenue.I had dinner the other night with a bank executive in charge of government finance who told me that the aggregate spend of all the infrastructure projects in Panama totals more than $13 billion. This is roughly 50% of the entire Panamanian economy.
The equivalent in the United States would be the government announcing a 'Rebuild America' infrastructure spending initiative in the range of $8 TRILLION! No doubt, it's a lot of money for this small country.
Panama (and particularly Panama City) has been in a seemingly perpetual state of construction for nearly 10-years. The long boom in residential construction created an impressive skyline of condo towers along the new Cinta Costera. But residential demand peaked and petered several years ago.
In an effort to keep the party going, the government has essentially swapped a residential construction boom for an infrastructure boom.
There are so many projects here, you'd think you were in Chonqing, China. And it's made life miserable for anyone who has to get into an automobile– Panama City's already dismal traffic has now become utterly hopeless.
The real issue is that Panama's debt has been steadily rising to finance several projects. In many cases, the debt increase has outpaced the country's dizzying GDP growth. For example, Panama's debt rose 10.3% in 2010, while GDP only increased 7.5%.
According to some of my local attorneys who work on the deals, many of these infrastructure projects are now being creatively financed: selling bonds of off-the-books quasi-government entities that own securitized future cash flows.
It's all an elaborate process to keep the debt from hitting the government balance sheet and obfuscating Panama's true fiscal status. Official debt is now hovering near 50% of GDP, but the actual figure is much higher. [...]
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