🎶 Dead By Xmas Now Anyway (Hey! Hey!) 🎶

Trump 'caught in a trap of his own making' and running for president made it worse: reporthttps://t.co/U5ma4wxFSV

— Raw Story (@RawStory) February 7, 2024

"Trump’s sudden cash demands are exacerbated by a quirk in New York law," wrote political investigations reporter Jose Pagliery. "Not only would the judgment get automatically inflated by an unusually high interest rate of 9 percent, but Trump would need to give the court the enlarged total — plus an extra 10 to 20 percent — in order to appeal and have another day in court. And it would all be due by mid-March."

N.B. It’s not really a “quirk” in New York law. Even Texas has the same statutory requirement at the same interest rate. That’s a statutory interest rate following federal law (same interest rate on federal judgments, so that rate applies to both Carroll verdicts), set at a time when that was a rather low rate. Ah yes, I remember it well. Back when usury laws were repealed, and dinosaurs roamed the mud flats.

Read on, it gets better:

"The self-proclaimed billionaire real estate tycoon is about to be caught in a trap of his own making," Pagliery added, "forced to front a massive amount of cash and possibly liquidate assets — while potentially unable to access the money, because the court order could limit his ability to tap his Monopoly board of properties."

It also seems Trump being president makes him a bad credit risk.

“Sureties require an indemnification agreement, a contract for the bond," said Neil Pedersen, who runs an appellate bond agency in Manhattan. "Now a concern would be: How do you perfect an indemnity of the person that could be the next sitting president? How do you take that person to court?”

Oh, and there’s this:

New York Supreme Court justice Arthur Engoron is still considering how much to penalize the former president in the civil fraud trial, but he signaled that might run even higher than the $370 million sought by attorney general Letitia James, and state laws would put Trump in a sudden and perilous cash crunch....

I told you he’d be broke by November. 😈