Wednesday 23 August 2017

In which I apologise for misrepresenting Donald J Trump

Yesterday I made a snide remark about "the special favours Trump's been doing for his rich buddies on Wall Street." On reflection, I think I was being inaccurate and unfair.

Sure, Trump's inner circle are all high net worth individuals (why would you hang out with a guy like that, if you respected anything other than money?), but they're not from Wall Street. As Bess Levin wrote in Vanity Fair a while back "Trump’s habit of reneging on contracts and suing his lenders meant that virtually nobody on Wall Street wanted to work with him."

Yep, it turns out out that bankers adore not being cheated out of their money even more than they love the mega-rich. So there was presumably no real love lost between The Donald and Squiddy McSquidface, even before that eclipse gag.

As Bess Levin's article notes, there is an exception that proves the rule, namely  Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump $4 billion over the last 20 years and kept his line of credit open despite being sued by Trump in 2008:
...when he fell behind on payments on the $640 million loan he was given to build Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Incredibly, in order to avoid paying the $40 million he had personally guaranteed, Trump and his lawyer argued that “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing”—i.e. the global financial crisis—and therefore it should pay him $3 billion in damages under the extraordinary event clause in his contract. Naturally, the bank countersued, calling the real-estate developer’s claim “classic Trump.” In the end, after threatening to take his name off the building if he wasn’t granted more time to pay, the bank gave Trump extra time; when he did pay the money he owed to the firm’s real-estate lending division, it was with another loan he got from Deutsche’s wealth-management unit. Trump subsequently moved his business from the real estate group to the private wealth management group, where, according to the Times, “executives were more willing to deal with him.”
Trump's $3 billion damages claim was ridiculous, but the argument that “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing”, is also just about the least misleading statement that Trump has ever made.

There's a possible Russia connection in Trump's dealings with Deutsche Bank, but even if there isn't, there's a very interesting story buried in all those loans, about how much, or little, Trump is really worth, once you subtract the money he owes to the creditors he's not managed to diddle. Enough to bring the whole house of cards down, once counsel Mueller's investigation exposes the workings of the Trump shell game? No wonder Wall Street's wary of him - those guys really hate rip-off merchants and it takes one to know one.

Could @realDonaldTrump be closer to the wannabe lynchers in Charlottesville than the looters on Wall Street, not just in his bigotry, but in his real net worth?

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