Friday, February 23, 2024

Slim Pickin’s

One option Mullins comes up with is that Trump owns 27 mortgage-free properties that he can borrow against. His property portfolio is collectively worth more than $1.1 billion.
Except the financial records of Trump, Inc. are so muddled the court monitor can’t make heads or tails of them, and if Deutsche Bank was making massive unsecured loans to Trump all those years, they got some ‘splainin’ to shareholders to do.

Besides, even without the court prohibition, what are the odds Trump is good for this if the only way he can pay is to fire sale buildings?

The barrier to that, however, is that the fraud ruling last week dictated that Trump can't borrow money from a bank that does business in New York. 
 "The New York judgment barred him from borrowing from any financial institution 'chartered by or registered with' the state," Mullins quoted from the ruling. It leaves Trump with few banking options. 
Another alternative, which legal analyst Lisa Rubin warned of, is Trump taking money from a foreign national or even another country. 
"But a friendly fellow billionaire, a bank that doesn't do business in New York, or even a foreign entity could all do the trick, especially if they're hoping to curry favor with the former — and potentially future — president," wrote Mullins.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. Trump is more likely to end his life in jail than spend four more years in the White House. That’s a lot of money to curry favor with a guy more likely to be a guest of the federal government than the leader of it. And he owes this money, with no real prospect of paying it back. He had people stay in his property in D.C., in hopes of currying favor, but a few nights in an overpriced hotel is worlds away from ponying up half a billion dollars you know you’ll never get back. I don’t think even Putin or the Saudi royals want to throw money away like that.

Besides, forget the bar on New York lenders: Trump can’t borrow the money without the court monitor’s approval. And since the bond has to cover individuals and all the business defendants, the court monitor will know who’s ponying up from the House of Saud, or just some philanthropic billionaire (is there such a creature?). Everything he owns is subject to court oversight; that would include a gift or loan of this magnitude. Rubin says we wouldn’t necessarily know who the generous soul is; I think it unlikely we wouldn’t know quite easily.

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