MTA Can't Go Bankrupt. So How Does It Survive?
The largest U.S. public transit system will have to rely on debt and bailouts to extinguish a financial “four-alarm fire.”
Next stop: Subsidies and Debt.
Photographer: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a lot of problems, but bankruptcy isn’t one of them.
That’s not because the MTA couldn’t use the debt relief. Far from it: The agency has more than $40 billion of municipal bonds outstanding, borrowed $1.1 billion in early May to pay down maturing notes, issued an additional $525 million two weeks later for infrastructure needs, secured a $950 million credit agreement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of China, and won approval to tap the Federal Reserve’s emergency liquidity facility. Debt is as much a part of the lifeblood of the nation’s largest public transit system as the subway tunnels themselves.