Dr. Aaoouh
Full Member
I love the hyperbole here.
No, the writer did not get the substantive details correct.
First of all, Trump inflated the value of his properties for the loans and deflated the values of the same properties at the same time when paying his taxes. He claimed that buildings that had rent controlled apartments did not have rent controlled apartments. He claimed that his own apartment was three times larger than it actually was. He claimed that buildings under construction were bringing in income. Among many other things. These are all frauds. They are all illegal. And they are not simply cases of "who knows what the actual market value is". (And the fact that market products fluctuate almost daily does not mean that they fluctuate wildly daily and that no one has any idea what the value of something is. That's simply nonsense.)
He did this to get better loan rates from banks that would have charged him more had they known what he knew. He fraudulently passed on his risks to the bank. He happened to get away with it for a while. Should the bank have figured it all out in advance? The bank is working in a large part with information provided by the client. They have no choice. Part of the reason that there are fraud laws is that banks can't see everything completely separate from information they receive from the client, contrary to what the writer seems to think. It's like saying that if someone withholds significant information from the tax authorities to pay less taxes, it's the government's fault for not catching him. It's also like saying that if I run red lights all the time, I should get to argue that since I didn't hit anyone it shouldn't matter.
Most of the Crash of 2009 came from various entities hiding the real value of their assets. It worked for a while. Then it didn't. And in the particular case of Trump, Trump was president of the United States. When he is inaugurated, he vows to uphold the law, and not just the laws he likes. IMO, they didn't hit him hard enough in New York. They should have shut him down.
Finally, if the writer is so free market oriented, he should personally try what Trump did. Make up assets to use as collateral for loans and hide assets from the government when filing his taxes and see what happens. That's what banana republics do. FAFO.
