Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, took to Twitter to announce that an $800 billion bond was paid with interest, and that his country’s “Bitcoin bet” continues.
President Bukele was more than a little surprised at what he called the “Literally, hundreds of articles” that were written by the mainstream media stating that El Salvador was going to default on its debt.
In the past year, almost every legacy international news outlet said that because of our “#Bitcoin bet”, El Salvador was going to default on its debt by January 2023 (since we had an 800 million dollar bond maturing today).
Literally, hundreds of articles https://t.co/rEiK7K13U4
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) January 24, 2023
The president highlighted just one of these articles as an example in his tweet. This was by the Spanish news platform El Pais, a highly respected news outlet which is the equivalent of the Washington Post for the US, or The Times, for the UK.
The article read that investors doubted that El Salvador would be able to meet its debt obligations, and tied this in with Bitcoin’s price fall. The article covered the IMF’s displeasure with Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador, and it also covered the Fitch credit rating downgrade.
In another Tweet, President Bukele also drew attention to a July full page spread in the NY Times which in his view helped to create the narrative that El Salvador would be going bust.
He wrote in the tweet:
Full page spreads on the @nytimes and all, creating the narrative that El Salvador was broke and going to default.
I called them out at the time, but of course, who was going to believe us and not every international news outlet and their “economic geniuses”?
Full page spreads on the @nytimes and all, creating the narrative that El Salvador was broke and going to default.
I called them out at the time, but of course, who was going to believe us and not every international news outlet and their “economic geniuses”? https://t.co/a3YCZUjRg2
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) January 24, 2023
In yet another tweet he called out various news outlets that had stated that without an IMF deal, El Salvador would not be able to make its 2023 bond repayment because of the country’s “Bitcoin losses”.
According to the president, in opposition to all the hundreds of news outlets that had stated that El Salvador would default, only one news outlet, the Colombian Semana.com, reported that his country had paid its debt.
It’s understood that the El Salvadoran expenditure on Bitcoin is only a very small percentage of its finances, but the country might need to expect one more pull back from the cryptocurrency in order to lay the base for the next bull market.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Source: https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2023/01/el-salvador-pays-debts-in-full-as-bitcoin-continues-to-rise