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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26879 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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The banks (and other business partners) are the ones being defrauded. That's sort of the point.

None of them alleged that during the course of business. They all got paid. The numbers were arbitrary.

Second, if it were random speculation, his estimates would be under the true value as often as they were over the true value.

Random was the wrong word. The right word is, self serving normal stuff that businesses do and tax people have to go along with 99.99999999% of the time or the state's economy collapses.

None of them alleged that during the course of business. They all got paid.

Didn't he brag about how often he files bankruptcy to get out of debts? Haven't his companies filed for bankruptcies more often than anyone else's in the US? Haven't there been hundreds of stories about his organizations not paying their bills and obligations?

I haven't gone over all the statements in the case to sort out the specific claims and charges on this particular valuation, but the idea that everyone got paid and no one was hurt by these practices feels leaves me skeptical.

However, part of the reason I'm not investigating that in more depth is because it doesn't matter; you can in fact be defrauded even if you don't lose money. If that sounds weird, remember that all of finance is about the expected value of an investment.

If Trump overstated the worth and stability of his holdings, then any loans he took out were riskier than the banks thought. The expected value of those loans was lower than the banks thought, and if they'd known the truth they might not have made those deals, or might have charged higher interest to compensate (which is a material loss even if the loans were paid back).

Drunk driving is illegal even if you don't hit someone, because it increases the chances you will hit someone. Similarly, lying about how risky it is to make a loan to you is fraud, even if you manage to pay back that particular loan.

The right word is, self serving normal stuff that businesses do and tax people have to go along with 99.99999999% of the time or the state's economy collapses.

Indeed, many things are both illegal and common, and enforcement of pretty much all crimes is spotty and arbitrary at best. That's a sad state of affairs and I think we should solve it with fewer laws; nonetheless, this is not a good reason to decry the law being enforced correctly one time, unless you decry it all the other times too (isolated demands for rigor etc).

That said, there's still such a thing as matter of degree; this was a very long pattern of very big lies on very big deals, a pretty big outlier from the common range for this type of thing.

Again, I agree that it's common to round your $146k income up to $150k when applying for a mortgage. This was a lot bigger than that.

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