Sunday, February 18, 2024

For The King Of Debt, Is Cash King?

 Trump testified that his name has a lot of value. Well , that’s what he said:

According to the Times' Rukmini Callimachi, who collected data from real estate listing website CityRealty and ATTOM, a property data analytics company, "A review of the price per square foot of condominiums in the seven buildings in Manhattan that still carry the Trump name found that the value dropped 23 percent between 2013 and 2023," with ATTOM setting the decrease at 17 percent. 
She then noted that the four buildings that removed the Trump logo from their facades by the end of 2020 "ended the decade from 2013 to 2023 up 9 percent." 
According to the report, Tramp's landmark Trump Tower has also been hit hard with the average price per square foot of its condominiums collapsing "49 percent since 2013, according to Ondel Hylton, the senior director of content and research at CityRealty," adding than aging building has also been surpassed by newer developments. 
As Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh put it, “It’s huge,” citing a 25 percent drop "compared with similar properties from their peak in 2013."  
“This analysis cleanly identifies that it is the Trump brand that is responsible for the value deterioration,” Van Nieuwerburgh elaborated. “Removing the Trump name from the building removes the loss associated with the name.” 
Surveying the numbers, a stunned Ondel Hylton, the senior director of content and research at CityRealty, told the Times, "I just crunched the numbers in the past half hour, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it."
Now, the truth is, we don’t know much about Trump’s financial condition. Even the court appointed monitor has said that.
He won't be able to go to banks and get a loan," she explained. "While he was president, and since he left office, I think a lot of people, when they think of Donald Trump's banking relationships, think of Deutsche Bank which has done so much with him. What a lot of people don't know is that in recent years, Deutsche Bank has exited at the scene." 
"In fact, another thing that was not noticed, I think during his presidency there was so much going on, is just that Donald Trump has been shrinking his financial holdings. He sold, you know well-known, the old post office hotel that he had the operating lease to in Washington." 
"He sold the operating lease to a golf course he had in New York," she elaborated. "He is also been quietly selling condominiums around New York and buildings he owned. He sold a house he owned in L.A. He has been, I don't know, stockpiling the cash he has been selling down, we don't know how much cash he has on hand. He said last year, close to 400 million." 
"I'm always careful when I talk about that cash on hand," she cautioned. "It could be 200, 300 [million], the next day, it could be zero, if he has to make a payment on something. We really don't have a lot of visibility in this cash position, but we know he has been selling assets that should have raised cash."
Was he liquidating? Or was he clearing debt? Lienholders don’t generally want to hear their collateral is gone. That tends to bring lawsuits and even involuntary petitions for bankruptcy. If Trump sold off properties too quietly, we’d have heard of it. Did Trump pay cash for all these properties? Not likely, as notorious as Trump is for not wanting to part with cash, and how he’s described himself as the “King of Debt.”

That debt is undoubtedly collaterized. 

The D.C. hotel, for example: word is the place emptied out when Trump left D.C. The interest in the place was only to buy access to the President. Trump sold the place to get out from under it. Did he make money on the sale? Who knows? So we don’t know if he disposed of it for cash, or to pay off a debt. Is he now cash rich? Or debt free? Or at least freeer?

Even the court monitor isn’t sure. But the deadline to appeal the second Carroll judgment is fast approaching, and he has less than 30 days to appeal the fraud judgment. He claims to have $400 million in cash on hand. That’s not enough to bond the fraud judgment ($450 million per Letitia James, which is the judgment plus interest, as required), much less the Carroll judgment, plus interest, as well.

So in less than a month, we’ll see.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)