Tag Archives: interest

Trump’s Biggest Lender Wants New Terms

by KristinWatters Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s biggest creditor, Deutsche Bank, is seeking to restructure some of the president-elect’s debt, Bloomberg reports. Trump’s companies owe the German lender at least $364 million, more than half of his total $713 million debt load, and his loans with the bank—a potential source of leverage over the incoming commander-in-chief—pose a significant conflict of interest.

According to Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank is seeking to limit the conflict by removing Trump’s personal guarantee from the loans, meaning that the president-elect would not be personally on the hook if the loans go bad. Trump has also personally guaranteed loans to his second-biggest lender, Ladder Capital Finance, to which he owes $282 million.

Bloomberg cited unnamed sources who indicated that the bank was the party seeking the changes and that delicate restructuring talks are underway. Trump’s personal guarantees have helped him secure low interest rates, and if the guarantees are removed, the bank could compensate by raising the interest on Trump’s loans or asking for other assets to serve as collateral.

Mother Jones reviewed all of Trump’s publicly listed debts earlier this month and found that Trump has four loans with Deutsche Bank: two mortgages on his Miami Doral golf course, a loan on his Chicago tower, and a $170 million loan tied to his brand-new Washington, DC, hotel. All four loans were made through Deutsche Bank’s private bank, a division that caters to high-net-worth individuals and has the flexibility to make loans that the commercial lending side of the firm might balk at.

Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Ladder Capital show that Trump has guaranteed $8 million of his $100 million mortgage on Trump Tower and $26 million of the $160 million mortgage on the 40 Wall Street office tower.

Since his election, Trump has repeatedly faced questions about the unprecedented conflicts of interest posed by his business empire. So far, the president-elect has done little to allay concerns about his business interests. Trump canceled a scheduled press conference earlier this month at which he said he would discuss how he would separate himself from his business, but he also indicated that his solution did not involve divesting himself from his assets. Instead, he suggested he would step back from daily operations. That would do little to insulate himself from conflicts, and it would do nothing to solve the ethical issues created by his loan guarantees, which make him personally responsible if the bank ever deems the terms of the loans to have been broken. Even if he does divorce himself from his business, he can’t separate himself from the guarantees that put his own money on the line—or from the leverage his lenders have over him.

Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank when he enters the White House is particularly fraught because the German firm is currently in the midst of a regulatory tussle with the Justice Department. In 2015, the bank paid American and European regulators $2.5 billion in a settlement for its role in helping to rig the interest rate market. Now the bank is negotiating with the Justice Department on an even bigger potential settlement—as much as $14 billion—for its role in the creation and sale of bad mortgage products in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Separately, Reuters recently reported that Ladder Capital may be exploring putting itself up for sale, opening the possibility that Trump’s second-largest lender could wind up in the hands of interests that aren’t necessarily aligned with America’s.

The potential conflicts of interest over the Deutsche Bank loans are separate from concerns that ethics experts have expressed about a possible violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits government officials from receiving beneficial treatment from foreign governments. Those concerns stem from a $920 million loan from the state-owned Bank of China and a coalition of lenders (that also includes Deutsche Bank) to a real estate partnership that Trump is part of.

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Trump’s Biggest Lender Wants New Terms

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Trump Still Blowing Off Intelligence Briefings

by RodrigoMota Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

A few years ago, conservatives raised an alarm over the fact that President Obama didn’t receive an in-person intelligence briefing every day. Sometimes, it turned out, he met with the briefer, but other times he just read the briefing material. This was deemed a major threat to national security.

So how about Donald Trump?

President-elect Donald Trump is receiving an average of one presidential intelligence briefing a week, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter, far fewer than most of his recent predecessors….Trump has asked for at least one briefing, and possibly more, from intelligence agencies on specific subjects, one of the officials said. The source declined to identify what subjects interested the president-elect, but said that so far they have not included Russia or Iran.

My guess is that Trump (a) thinks he already knows everything he needs to know, and (b) is afraid the briefings might force him to acknowledge things he doesn’t want to believe. In any case, he’s going to be president pretty shortly, and surely Republicans are deeply concerned about his apparent lack of interest in the intelligence community’s reports.

Right?

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Trump Still Blowing Off Intelligence Briefings

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Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

by KitMowery0340 Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Is Donald Trump using his Twitter outbursts about the popular vote to distract us from this week’s real news: the vast conflicts of interest between his business empire and his upcoming presidency? This question is getting a lot of attention today.

The answer is no. I mean yes. But no, not really. On the other hand, maybe a little bit yes. I’m sorry, what was the question again?

The real answer is the same as it was during the campaign: Trump is dedicated to creating constant uproars all the time. Is this because it’s just who he is? Or is it part of an instinctive strategy to keep us from ever paying attention to anything for long, aside from the fact that Trump is in the limelight? I can’t say for sure, but I’d put money on the latter.

My belief in this comes mainly from an observation about the campaign: Trump, it turns out, is fully able to focus on something for months at a time if he wants to. And the thing he focused on was “Crooked Hillary” and her emails. That was a constant theme of his campaign, which he hammered on relentlessly for months. And the press assisted, covering every new email revelation—big or small, meaningful or trivial— in blazing headlines on the front page.

And it worked. Sure, he needed a lucky break at the end when James Comey released his letter, but he had set the stage to take advantage of it. This constant drumbeat on a single issue was spectacularly successful.

Trump engaged in a high-risk-high-reward strategy by creating a strong brand identity—for Hillary Clinton. And as any brand manager can tell you, this is crucial. The relentless focus on Hillary Clinton’s email hurt her badly by confirming the sense that she was at least mildly corrupt. Trump’s scandals were different. The press did cover them, but it was something new every week. This didn’t confirm any particular view of Trump aside from his being a bit of a loose cannon. And within a week, each previous scandal was barely remembered. By November, the whole Access Hollywood thing—which was only four weeks old—might as well have been ancient history. It had been practically forgotten.

Donald Trump knows how to focus and he knows how to throw up lots of chaff to keep himself front and center. Does he mean this stuff to be a distraction? Beats me. I suspect it’s all intuitive with him. The only good news is that he can wear out his welcome doing this. In his previous life, that wasn’t a big problem because the press didn’t want to cover him 24/7 anyway. Now they do. He is likely to find that after a few months of this, even his most fervent supporters are a little weary of it.

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Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

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Donald Trump Promised to Release a List of His Creditors. We’re Still Waiting.

by JoanW10cgjdlk Posted on October 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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During the first presidential debate, moderator Lester Holt asked Donald Trump about his refusal to release his tax returns, explaining that part of “the reason nominees have released their returns for decades” is so voters can determine if a potential president’s debts reveal any conflicts of interest. “Don’t Americans have a right to know if there are any conflicts of interest?” Holt asked. Trump brushed the question off, saying that “you don’t learn that much from tax returns.” (As the New York Times reported this weekend, just a few pages of Trump’s tax records from 1995 reveal that the GOP nominee may not have paid federal income taxes for 18 years.) He claimed that the personal financial disclosures he had already filed with the Federal Election Commission provided a more detailed overview of his finances, though those records do not reveal income, tax rates, charitable donations, and loan interest payments. “But,” Trump told Holt, “I could give you a list of banks, I would—if that would help you, I would give you a list of banks. These are very fine institutions, very fine banks. I could do that very quickly.”

Mother Jones has been trying to determine Trump’s full roster of creditors, so we immediately contacted his campaign to request the list Trump offered. A week later, we’re still waiting.

Even without the release his tax returns—a standard practice for presidential candidates since the Nixon era—it is clear that should he reach the White House he would face significant conflicts of interest due to his complex business interests. His personal financial disclosure report provides an incomplete view of his finances. Filed in May, the form lists 16 loans that are valued in vague ranges that make it impossible to determine the total amount he owes. For instance, five of Trump’s loans are valued at $50 million or more (the FEC doesn’t require anything more specific). According to this disclosure, Trump owes a minimum of $315 million. But the real amount appears to be much higher. A search of property records throughout the United States shows that those 16 loans are valued, conservatively, at $675 million.

His financial disclosure forms likely do not reveal the full scope of his intricate finances. As the New York Times reported in August, Trump has invested in partnerships that owe nearly $2 billion—loans, including one from the Bank of China, that are not identified within his personal financial disclosure. Trump’s representatives told the Times that Trump would not be liable for those loans, but because he is an investor in the buildings used as collateral for these loans, his investments are certainly linked to the loans.

And Trump’s most recent financial disclosure is already out of date. For instance, Trump reported to the FEC in May that he owed UBS Real Estate, a subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant, between $5 million and $25 million in connection with a loan for commercial property at New York City’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. But Trump no longer has this loan. According to New York City property records, the loan was for $7 million, and his company paid it off with a new $7 million loan from a much smaller lender named Ladder Capital Finance. Trump’s history of failed deals and repeated bankruptcies has made him persona non grata with many of the world’s top banks, forcing him to rely on smaller institutions such as Ladder Capital. According to public documents, Trump currently owes Ladder Capital at least $275 million.

Ladder Capital specializes in packaging loans into larger portfolios that are eventually sold off to other lenders. This is significant because it would be important to know exactly who owns Trump’s debt—a potential source of leverage over a commander-in-chief. Tax returns would reveal to whom Trump is paying interest. It would be a small step forward in transparency, if the Trump campaign issues a list of his creditors. But the full scope of his finances—and his creditors—will not be known unless he releases his tax returns.

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Donald Trump Promised to Release a List of His Creditors. We’re Still Waiting.

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Farmworkers just won big in California.

by JocelynChauncy Posted on September 13, 2016

Accusations that Stein is an anti-vaxxer have followed the Green Party candidate throughout the race, even though she’s a Harvard-educated physician and not a graduate of the Jenny McCarthy school of medicine.

In a ScienceDebate.org survey of presidential candidates’ views on science, Stein gave them a somewhat modified answer on vaccines.

“Vaccines prevent serious epidemics that would cause harm to many people,” she said, adding:

To reverse the problem of declining vaccination rates, we need to increase trust in our public health authorities and all scientific agencies. We can do that by removing corporate influence from our regulatory agencies to eliminate apparent conflicts of interest and show skeptics, in this case vaccine-resistant parents, that the motive behind vaccination is protecting their children’s health, not increasing profits for pharmaceutical companies.

Stein’s been accused of pandering to anti-vaxxers before, for saying, “There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant … There were real questions that needed to be addressed.”

While she’s still hitting on her point about corporate influence, she’s sounding less loony these days.

In the same questionnaire, however, Stein didn’t budge on another topic in which she stands at odds with the scientific community: GMOs. She wants to place a moratorium on GMOs until they have been proven safe.

Of course, those persnickety scientists will tell you it’s impossible to prove anything is safe — but that’s not a reason to dismiss new plant varieties or lifesaving shots.

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Farmworkers just won big in California.

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What Happens to Merrick Garland if Hillary Clinton Wins?

by HarryXny261 Posted on August 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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David Atkins is unhappy about a Politico story suggesting that “top Senate Democrats” are pushing Hillary Clinton to stick with Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland if she wins in November, rather than replacing him with someone more liberal:

It seems increasingly likely that Clinton’s hands will be tied by the Obama Administration’s decision to nominate a centrist in Merrick Garland in the hopes of compromise with the current GOP. Democratic Senators are already pushing for Clinton not to displace Garland with a more liberal choice in the interest of “preserving political capital.”

….“Top Senate Democrats” never seem to learn their lesson about political capital and negotiating with Republicans in Congress. There is no amount of compromising or bending over backwards that will please Senate Republicans or even make them more willing to negotiate with Democrats over other key items. One of the more glaring falsehoods of the Democratic primary campaign was that Clinton would be able to make more effective deals and compromises with the opposition, enabling Clinton to get things done that Sanders could not.

The reality is that Congressional Republicans won’t compromise with Clinton any more than they would have with Sanders. And they won’t be more inclined to deal in good faith with her if she nominates Garland than if she were to pull his nomination and select someone else.

With a caveat or two, I agree with this. And yet, I can’t help think that something more is going on with Garland. Think about it. For starters, why did Obama nominate Garland? Not in hopes of compromise with Republicans, I think. He’s not an idiot. Rather, he did it as a campaign ploy: a way of making Republicans look so extreme that they weren’t even willing to confirm a moderate jurist that most of them had praised earlier in his career.

But now think about this from the other side. Why would anyone have agreed to be Obama’s accomplice in this? It was obvious from the start that Republicans were going to block confirmation no matter who it was. Why go through all the trouble and paperwork and so forth for nothing more than being able to help the president make his opponents look bad?

My guess is that Garland received a promise—probably implied rather than explicit—that Democrats would stick with him if they won in November. Obama would work to get him confirmed during the lame duck session, and would recommend to Hillary Clinton that she renominate him in 2017 if necessary.

Roughly speaking, Garland is being a team player in hopes that the team will stick with him even if someone better comes along. The question, then, isn’t whether Clinton should try to appease Republicans. It’s whether she ought to reward loyalty in a guy who agreed to play a difficult and thankless role.

So should she? And if I’m right, how should Republicans play this game?

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What Happens to Merrick Garland if Hillary Clinton Wins?

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Donald Trump’s "Huge Conflicts of Interest"

by RollandPardo Posted on June 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, Mother Jones reported that Donald Trump’s loans from the German-based Deutsche Bank—totaling at least $100 million and possibly much more—would pose a significant conflict of interest, should Trump, the GOP’s presumptive nominee, become president. After all, the bank was recently caught manipulating markets around the world (and had to pay $2.5 billion in fines), and it has has tried to evade US laws aimed at curtailing risky financial shenanigans and has attempted to influence the US government via lobbying.

Richard Painter, an attorney who teaches at the University of Minnesota and who was the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007, noted that Trump’s relationship with the overseas financial giant was disturbing: “having a president who owes a lot of money to banks, particularly when it’s on negotiable terms—it puts them at the mercy of the banks and the banks are at the mercy of regulators.” He added, “that is a potentially very troublesome business model for someone in public office.”

In response to the article, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) says that Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank—and his connections with other major financial institutions—could indeed pose trouble, were he to win the White House. In a statement to Mother Jones, the senator slammed Trump’s relationship with the bank:

The job of the President is to enforce the law fairly. If a serial lawbreaker like Deutsche Bank is caught manipulating markets again, how would Trump hold it accountable knowing that the bank had the power to pull the plug on his own businesses? That’s a question that should worry every American. These financial entanglements—along with many of his other ongoing business concerns and arrangements—present huge conflicts of interest.

In recent months, Warren has repeatedly challenged Trump. In a string of tweets in March, she listed all the ways Trump has been a “loser” (Trump University, bankruptcies, attacks on women, narcissism, bullying). On Stephen Colbert’s show, she declared, “The truth is that Trump inherited a fortune from his father, he kept it going by cheating and defrauding people, and then he takes his creditors through Chapter 11.” In a speech two weeks ago, she denounced the mogul for having said he was delighted to have made money off the 2008 economic crash: “Let’s face it: Donald Trump cares about exactly one thing—Donald Trump. It’s time for some accountability because these statements disqualify Donald Trump from ever becoming president. The free ride is over.” Trump has retorted by calling Warren “Pocahontas” and deriding her as “a woman that’s been very ineffective other than she’s got a big mouth.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for a comment regarding Warren’s remarks about his Deutsche Bank loans—or what Trump would do about his financial relationships if elected president.

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Donald Trump’s "Huge Conflicts of Interest"

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Can Donald Trump Get Away With Proposing to Destroy the US Government?

by FallonPratten Posted on May 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today the Wall Street Journal asks a vital question:

Donald Trump’s Plans Don’t Add Up. Do Voters Care?

Oh please. Bernie Sanders’ plans don’t add up and his followers couldn’t care less. Paul Ryan’s plans don’t add up. Republicans don’t care. Mitt Romney’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. John McCain’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. George Bush’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. Ronald Reagan’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared.

Now, I admit that Trump is performing a destruction test on this theory. His tax plan blows a $9.5 trillion hole in the deficit and he plans to increase spending on infrastructure and national defense and he promises not to touch Medicare or Social Security. He claims he’ll make up for this by cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and I suppose one could view this as the ultimate test of just how much waste, fraud, and abuse the public thinks the American government is responsible for. Unfortunately, the historical evidence probably doesn’t favor a rational answer.

So what does Trump’s budget look like? Someone must care, after all. At no small effort, I have created the colorful chart below. I used the CBO’s projections as my baseline. Trump says he wants to balance the budget, so that puts a firm cap on overall spending. He says he wants to spend more on defense, so I added a modest $20 billion per year to the baseline projection. He says he won’t touch Social Security or Medicare, so I left those at their baseline projections. The revenue number comes from TPC’s analysis of Trump’s tax plan. Ditto for the interest number. Trump says he wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, so I bumped up the current infrastructure budget by $100 billion and carried it through each year.

As you can see, by the end of eight years, not only are we spending zero dollars on nearly every government program, but infrastructure spending is also wiped out and we can make only a fraction of our interest payments:

So yeah, you could say this doesn’t add up. Or you could say it’s more of Trump’s usual buffoonery. Or that Donald Trump couldn’t care less about the federal budget. So why doesn’t this get more attention? Let’s take a series of guesses:

Most people find numbers confusing and boring. One trillion, ten trillion, whatever.
The press shies away from focusing on stuff like this because their readers find it confusing and boring and don’t read it.
Also because they routinely give Republicans a pass on this stuff. They figure it’s mostly just routine pandering, and all politicians do it.
In any case, the public takes tax and budget plans mostly as statements of values, not as things that will ever actually happen.

So there you have it. Trump is testing whether he can get away with literally proposing a tax and budget plan that would bankrupt the country and destroy nearly the entire federal government within just a few years. What do you think?

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Can Donald Trump Get Away With Proposing to Destroy the US Government?

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This Short Film Explains Why Businesses Should Maximize Value Over Profit

by AndrewNiland Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Aspiring documentary filmmaker Taylor Erickson has a theory: If businesses put the interests of their customers over short-term profits, they’ll be more successful in the long run, and society will be better off for it.

“When I was thinking about the economy, that was the first thing that came to my head,” says Erickson, 20. It’s the message at the center of his latest short film, titled “The Greatest Economics Lesson.” It recently won the grand prize in a video contest run by Econ4, a group of professors and consultants in search of a more equitable approach to economics.

In the film, Erickson recalls a time when his friend, a property investor, stopped trying to maximize profits from his properties and began to treat his tenants as partners, taking extra care to improve their houses. The result? His friend’s tenants were more satisfied with their situation, and they stayed longer and took better care of the homes—and he still made money.

“The thing that gets in the way is greed,” Erickson says in the video. “Businesses get so wrapped up in minimizing expenses and maximizing profits that they can neglect the human side of economics…Prioritize value, and you can absolutely still make money. On top of that, you’ll be making your world better by adding value to it.”

Erickson, who works at HOPE Worldwide, a faith-based community service nonprofit in Cleveland, says the lesson extends beyond the macroeconomy. The decisions parents make in spending their money, for instance, affect the wants and needs of the entire family.

And Erickson isn’t done offering lessons. For the last two months, he has channeled his interest in how society works into an attempt to make sense of how political candidates approach the prevailing issues of the election season. In a way, he says, he’s trying to spread “societal literacy,” to take a concept that’s unfamiliar and make it easy to understand. He’s working on a short film on food insecurity and hunger in Northeast Ohio.

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This Short Film Explains Why Businesses Should Maximize Value Over Profit

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Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy.

by Sherri0253 Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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As we all know, millennials don’t care much for Hillary Clinton. That’s OK. I’m on the other side of that particular fence, but there’s plenty of room for honest differences about her views and whether they’re right for the country—differences that I don’t think are fundamentally rooted in age.

But there’s one issue where I suspect that age really does trip up millennials: the widespread belief that Hillary isn’t trustworthy. It’s easy to understand why they might think this. After all, Hillary has been surrounded by a miasma of scandal for decades—and even if you vaguely know that a lot of the allegations against her weren’t fair, well, where there’s smoke there’s fire. So if you’re familiar with the buzzwords—Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, the Rose law firm, Troopergate, Ken Starr, Benghazi, Emailgate—but not much else, it’s only human to figure that maybe there really is something fishy in Hillary’s past.

But many of us who lived through this stuff have exactly the opposite view. Not only do we know there’s almost literally nothing to any of these “scandals,” we also know exactly how they were deliberately and cynically manufactured at every step along the way. We were there, watching it happen in real time. So not only do we believe Hillary is basically honest, but the buzzwords actively piss us off. Every time we hear a young progressive kinda sorta suggest that Hillary can’t be trusted, we want to strangle someone. It’s the ultimate proof of how the right wing’s big lie about the Clintons has successfully poisoned not just the electorate in general, but even the progressive movement itself.

I bring this up because I had to blink twice to make sure my eyes weren’t fooling me this morning. Jill Abramson has followed Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than two decades, first in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, then at the New York Times, where she eventually became Washington bureau chief (and even later, executive editor). Her perch gave her an unrivaled view into Hillary’s actions. Here’s what she had to say today in the Guardian:

I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

….Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

….I can see why so many voters believe Clinton is hiding something because her instinct is to withhold….Clinton distrusts the press more than any politician I have covered. In her view, journalists breach the perimeter and echo scurrilous claims about her circulated by unreliable rightwing foes.

As Abramson suggests, there are times when Hillary is her own worst enemy. The decades of attacks have made her insular and distrustful, and this often produces a lawyerly demeanor that makes her sound guilty even when she isn’t. As a result, the belief in Hillary’s slipperiness is now such conventional wisdom that it’s almost impossible to dislodge. I just checked Memeorandum to see if anyone was discussing Abramson’s piece, and I was unsurprised to find that it’s gone almost entirely unnoticed.

But the truth is that regardless of how she sometimes sounds, her record is pretty clear: Hillary Clinton really is fundamentally honest and trustworthy. Don’t let the conservative noise machine persuade you otherwise.

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Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy.

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