For those that don't want to click through: He is on the hook personally for hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that will come due next few years during his potential second term with no obvious way of paying it off. There's no way of knowing who has control of it.
Edit: and also from the thread, he owes > $1 Billion in total to lenders.
How can anyone seriously support him being in a position of power if this is true. The opportunity to buy that debt and call it as leverage to extract political gain is so easy and obvious. Does any of this debt trade on any market? If so a hedge fund could basically have puppet strings on the federal government.
Simple: it is not “true” to those who support him. They are told a completely different story - one of a successful businessman with unbending will, unfairly persecuted by the media, here to manifest God’s plan.
Yes, including that last one. Talk to any fundamental Christian on why.
First of all, as president he shouldn't have any private business interests. Second, under all standard policies, he wouldn't get the most basic security clearance with this fact pattern. Third, saying some other institution or GOP constituent could backstop is PART OF THE PROBLEM, then he is beholden to them, how is that a solution. Fourth, he deliberately withheld this information as part of a years long cover up, contrary to all prior norms, and we now know why, that alone should disqualify him from office. How much tribal blindness are we willing to accept in politics at this point?
You bring up many good points, none of which I strongly disagree with.
My only point was that it's not "easy and obvious" to "buy his debt and use it as leverage to extract political gain". There are many "outs" he can take if such an event occurred.
I started my career as a lawyer in 2008. I specialized on corporate bankruptcies and worked on many of the high profile cases we all read about. I can tell you I saw this first hand. I saw a hedge fund by a loan from a small community bank for $150k and use it to gum up the works and extract $50M. I guarantee Trump is at high risk of danger here. The legal system can absolutely be weaponized and with over $1B of debt there’s no way to know who owns every dollar. The thing is what if money isn’t what they demand? You’re assuming that they will accept payment of their debt. But with leverage comes opportunities for other demands. It’s actually terrifying to think of all of the things one could demand from a president or government under these circumstances. Absolutely insane.
Commercial real estate loans are often non recourse. You lend to the holding company who owns the property. If it fails you don’t necessarily have a claim on the owners of that company.
And I would expect covid to have decimated the value of commercial real estate, particularly hotels.
No. Recourse loans are listed on tax filings separately from non-recourse. The personal guarantee means it shows up on personal income statements. So no other records are needed.
You mean other than all of the past problems getting credit which forced him to seek out foreign funding in the first place? His businesses lose money and having so many bankruptcies where his partners have been left holding the bag is going to deter most bankers unless they have other ways to recoup their money.
Here’s an old report about his credit rating - note the “likely to default”:
The only bank that was lending to him, deutsche bank, literally had a board meeting and investigation to determine how he was able to bypass internal controls and get more loans after they had halted lending to him (he basically got the private wealth division to keep going after the commercial division said no more). If that is the most favorable lender left, future loans from anyone seem unlikely.
Is that a net position? I am not interested enough in the further details to try to figure it out for myself, but his net position is more important than the total debt.
He has had recent trouble selling his properties for the asking price. He put up Trump International (the DC hotel) on the market in Oct. 2019 for $500M. There were no buyers at that price before he took it off the market due to covid-19.
There is no indication that he has the resources to finance the debt. Nor is there indication that he does not have those resources. We simply do not know either way until a better picture of his finances comes out.
Does he though? He valued one property as $200M that was then later valued at $18M. He has a well documented history of inflating value estimates. He even claimed Trump Tower had more floors than it does (something so easy to count). So I would not just take the valuations at face value.
Edit: and also from the thread, he owes > $1 Billion in total to lenders.