El Salvador's president offers to buy back dollar bonds for third time this year amid Bitcoin rally and Trump election

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has offered to buy back dollar bonds for the third time this year amid a rally in bitcoin and the results of the U.S. election. According to a statement released on Tuesday, the government offered to buy back a series of notes maturing between 2027 and 2034. The total outstanding principal of these securities exceeds $2.5 billion. The statement did not say how the deal would be paid for. But a person familiar with the matter said the debt buybacks depend on new financing, details of which have not been released because the information is not yet public. El Salvador’s debt return has reached 4.7% since Trump won the U.S. presidential election last week, outperforming all emerging market countries except Ukraine, data show. Investors have long believed that a second term for Trump would help Bukele win support for an IMF loan. Katrina Butt, an economist at AllianceBernstein in New York, said: “The market sees El Salvador as a ‘Trump deal’, and people expect that closer personal ties between Bukele and Trump will benefit El Salvador, who are unlikely to have enough cash to make such a buyback and may need to go to the market to finance the deal.” (Bloomberg)