“汽车之城”底特律申请破产保护

This is cnn Breaking News. Welcome Back To the Latest. Now some Breaking News. Individuals go bankrupt. Businesses do it too all the time. But entire cities? Well, you must be talking about Detroit. Owing more than 18 billion dollars in debt, Motor City officially filed for bankruptcy just moments ago. I want to bring our Poppy Hollow.

Poppy, how does bankruptcy work for an entire city?

Well, it has to be approved by a judge through a Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing. But this is enormous. This is the largest municipality ever in the history of this country, Jake, to file for bankruptcy. I just got off a phone with Bill Nelly, he is the press secretary for Kevin Orr, who is the financial emergency manager in Detroit, he ascensively took control of the city back in March when the governor of Michigan put him in charge, and Bill Nelly told me at 4:06pm today, the governor along with the emergency manager of Detroit filed officially for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. This is a little sooner than we have expected. We are hearing rumbling that it could happen tomorrow, but it came today, as you said, this is a city that is 18 billion dollars in debt. This has been decades in the making. Why did this happen? A lot of reasons. The populations there have been declining precipitously. You've got the city of 1.5 million in 1950 to 700,000 today. That means fewer people pay taxes, the downfall of the auto industry, very poor tax collection, corruption in government, so many things have added up to this. But what is this gonna mean now? Is it, if they are approved, and have exit from bankruptcy, it gives them the power to pay their creditors back a lot less? To cut down pension and health care benefits for city workers? So it is gonna hurt, but it also means that Detroit can eventually, the hope is, get back on their feet, Jake.