Celebrating The Brazen Genius of Dealmaker Trump
[ Casino games are all rigged to give the house an advantage. It takes real business genius to bankrupt a casino multiple times. Financing with high interest junk bonds and owning multiple casinos competing with one another will do it:
Wikipedia: Revenues at Trump Castle took a sharp decline in 1990 due to competition from its newly opened sister property, Trump Taj Mahal, as well as broader economic factors such as the Gulf War and the early 1990s recession. [5] A payment to bondholders was made in December 1990 only with the help of a $3.5 million purchase of casino chips by Trump's father, Fred Trump, which was later determined to be an illegal loan, for which the casino paid a fine of $30,000. [6] Unable to make its next payment on $338 million in bonds, the Castle began debt restructuring negotiations in May 1991.
Daddy tried to bail him out, sending a family lawyer with millions of dollars in a suitcase to buy chips that would never be played. That wasn't a loan, it was a GIFT. After he went completely bust, he borrowed $20 million from each of his three living siblings. Then he did that again next year. Loans pledged against his share of the family business and his father's inheritance. The Trump Organiztion is NOT all owned by Donnie. There's no way he could own more than 8%. ]
by Steve Berman
2 days
Trump could bankrupt a whorehouse on a Navy base.
If you're an American steel foundry worker, you should celebrate the genius of President Trump. He has given you a free pass to keep your job, even if your company is run inefficiently, suffers from expensive supply and logistics, and is burdened with immense pension gaps and union demands. And surely, if Trump did it, it's going to work.
Just like his casinos. Or Trump Steaks, or Trump Vodka (which is now only sold in Israel for consumption one week a year), or the Trump Shuttle. All of which have been smashing successes--if you need a tax write off.
I'm convinced that Donald Trump, as a businessman, could have bankrupted a whorehouse on a Navy base. He managed to take the most profitable, least risky business on earth, gambling, and run it into the ground, while extracting maximum personal cash from the deals and leaving investors with huge losses.
This whole tariff thing has been chewed and spit out years ago, before Trump made his run for the White House. In 2014, Tom Worstall, a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, penned this in Forbes.
He wrote:
However, there's another problem with some of the propaganda that is being spread around over this issue. The Economic Policy Institute\claims that up to half a million jobs could be at risk as a result of these [cheap imports](http://www.epi.org/publication/surging-steel-imports/):*
Surging imports of unfairly traded steel are threatening U.S. steel production, which supports more than a half million U.S. jobs across every state of the nation. The import surge has depressed domestic steel production and revenues, leading to sharp declines in net income in the U.S. steel industry over the past two years (2012–2013), layoffs for thousands of workers, and reduced wages for many more.
There's a distinct problem with this estimate of 500,000 jobs at risk. Which is that the entire US steel industry doesn't have that many jobs in it. In fact, there appear to be some 130,000 to 153,000 jobs in total in that entire US steel industry.
Jonah Goldberg summed this up in a tweet, followed by his " G-File" takedown on the idiocy of this tariff.
 Jonah Goldberg
?@JonahNRO
“‘Trade wars are good’ is the ‘ass cancer is a blast’ of economics.” — Adam Smith
5:46 AM - Mar 2, 2018
President Trump shares with President Obama the idea that nations compete with each other economically. They don’t. Businesses compete with each other. If China was leveled by a massive earthquake, it would boost our “competiveness,” but it would devastate our economy. Obama wanted to pour billions into everything from schools to solar panels on the grounds that we needed to beat China. Tom Friedman wanted America to be “China for a Day” because he was sure technocrats in Washington were smarter than the market and that they could fix our problems. This thinking was cockeyed when Obama peddled it, and it’s no less cockeyed when Trump is. It’s all a conspiracy against the people.
See, Trump's whole argument is based on the fact that other countries' steel industries "dump" steel on America by pricing below "fair value." But that ignores the entire point of capitalism that "fair value" is the agreement of someone willing to pay a price for something and the seller agreeing to sell at that price. It happens all the time in business where companies "buy the business" in certain areas to protect their more valuable business interests in other areas.
These kinds of deals are not sustainable (ask Venezuela). So the market serves as the ultimate correction tool. Except when people like Trump get involved and decide to put their thumbs on the scales of the market. Just like when Trump put his thumb on the scales of his Atlantic City casino (answering the question: what happens when you borrow so much at a high interest rate that you can't earn enough on the House take to service the debt?), or on the defunct jets of the Trump Shuttle, we will see what happens when we artificially inflate the price of steel to employ 150,000 workers.
The market is a harsh corrector. As a private businessman, Trump could flimflam and posture and get out of deals by trying to fleece Merv Griffin. As president, the only ones who get fleeced will be American consumers.
But let's celebrate the brazen genius of Donald Trump, super deal maker.
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