As you may have heard, Puerto Rico is currently in the midst of a major humanitarian crisis wrought by Hurricane Maria and exacerbated by the U.S. territory‘s dire financial situation. In recession since 2006, the Puerto Rican government turned to heavy borrowing to balance its budget, racking up debts to creditors in the tens of billions of dollars. In 2015, the governor announced that with the economy in a “death spiral,” it would be unable to repay the roughly $72 billion it owed, and last year, Congress enacted the PROMESA law, which acted as a kind of bankruptcy protection (as a territory, Puerto Rico is not allowed to declare bankruptcy). Experts expected the island’s recovery to take years, and that was before the devastation brought by Maria, including the collapse of Puerto Rico’s power grid.

Because Donald Trump seems to suffer from a medical condition wherein all of the worst thoughts that cross his mind instantly exit his mouth, his initial response to Puerto Rico’s crisis was to remind the disaster-stricken island of all the money it owes Wall Street and will have to repay. Then on Tuesday, following a clumsy effort to project empathy in Puerto Rico—which included reassuring victims that their hurricane wasn’t “a real catastrophe like Katrina” and throwing paper towels into a crowd like he was at a sporting event—Trump decided to inject some financial volatility into the mix. “We have to look at their whole debt structure,” Trump told Fox News in an interview Tuesday night. “You know they owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street. We’re gonna have to wipe that out. That’s gonna have to be—you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.”

While the notion of simply disappearing Puerto Rico’s debt would certainly be helpful to the island, it’s not exactly the kind of thing that inspires confidence in the U.S. financial system, or the sort of thing that encourages investors to lend money. Following Trump’s remarks, Puerto Rico’s bonds plunged to a record low.

As Bloomberg noted, the idea that anyone could “wipe out” $74 billion in municipal debt, “billions of which are guaranteed by the island’s constitution, would shake investor faith in a market long considered one of the safest of havens.” Borrowing costs are already rising. There’s also the small question of whether or not Trump or the federal government actually has the power to help forgive Puerto Rico’s debt burden anyway.

As is now standard practice, Trump’s comments sent underlings scrambling to reassure the world that the president should not be taken at his word. “I think what you heard the president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt problem,” White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said Wednesday. “We are not going to bail them out. We are not going to pay off those debts. We are not going to bail out those bond holders.”