Who's excited for the investigation into Hunter Biden's business dealings while daddy was VP? Aghh, our new normal. Good times.
Who's excited for the investigation into Hunter Biden's business dealings while daddy was VP? Aghh, our new normal. Good times.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Decades-old Trump tax returns show over $1B in losses: report
https://nypost.com/2019/05/07/decade...losses-report/
World's Greatest BusinessmanThe New York Times obtained 10 years worth of President Trump’s tax returns from the late 1980s and early 1990s — and reported how he lost hundreds of millions of dollars on failed business deals.
The documents from 1985-1994 show he lost millions each year on casinos, hotels and retail space — totaling a loss of $1.7 billion for the decade, according to the paper.
Compared to IRS data, Trump lost more money than most other taxpayers during that time. In 1990 and 1991, he lost $250 million — double the next closest filer for those years, the paper said.
Trump lost so much money during this period that he avoided paying income tax for eight of those 10 years, the Times reported.
Trump lawyer Charles J. Harder called the figures “demonstrably false.” He also told the paper that it’s statements “about the president’s tax returns and business from 30 years ago are highly inaccurate,” without providing specifics.
“I.R.S. transcripts, particularly before the days of electronic filing, are notoriously inaccurate [and] would not be able to provide a reasonable picture of any taxpayer’s return,” he added.
The paper said a White House official had earlier claimed: “The president got massive depreciation and tax shelter because of large-scale construction and subsidized developments. That is why the president has always scoffed at the tax system and said you need to change the tax laws. You can make a large income and not have to pay large amount of taxes.”
In 1985 Trump borrowed hundreds of millions and purchased a casino for $351.8 million, a Manhattan hotel for $80 million, the Florida resort Mar-a-Lago for $10 million, a building for $60 million, and rail yards on the West Side for $85 million, the report said.
Some investments, like Mar-a-Lago, did not turn a profit for years.
In total Trump lost $46 million in 1985, in addition to $5.6 million carried over from the previous year.
Trump then bought an apartment building in West Palm Beach for $43 million in 1986, losing $68.7 million for that year.
The real estate mogul purchased a $29 million yacht just weeks before the stock market crash of 1987. He then bought then Plaza Hotel for $407 million, leading to $30 million in losses for that year.
Trump also recorded $42.2 million in business losses for 1987, and $30.4 million for 1988, the Times said.
His business losses skyrockets in 1989, when he lost $181.7 million.
The Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino opened in 1990 and was severely deep in dept, causing a combined loss of $517.6 million in 1990 and 1991.
then the new kids on the block used their wealth to make Trump Putin's bitch. The obligation ends only when trump dies.
During the 1990s, once Boris Yeltsin became President of Russia in 1991, the oligarchs emerged as well-connected entrepreneurs who started from
nearly nothing and became rich through participation in the market via connections to the corrupt, but elected, government of Russia during the
state's transition to a market-based economy. The so-called voucher-privatization program enabled a handful of young men to become billionaires,
specifically by arbitraging the vast difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities (e.g. gas, oil) and the prices prevailing on
the world market.
Between 2000 and 2004, Putin apparently engaged in a power-struggle with some oligarchs, reaching a "grand bargain" with them. This bargain allowed
the oligarchs to maintain their powers, in exchange for their explicit support of Putin's government. Many more business people have become oligarchs
during Putin's time in power, and often due to personal relations with Putin.
Trump sold a Palm Beach estate that he bought for $41 million to a Russian oligarch for $95 million only four years later in 2008. Months earlier
Trump Entertainment Resorts filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy while Trumpa-Dumpa was struggling to find banks willing to lend to him.
I worked as a financial analyst in the real estate tax shelter business in the 1980s right up to when the 1986 Tax Reform Act was passed and became law. And while that tax reform eliminated the ability for *passive* real estate investors, i.e. limited partnership shareowners, to get the tax shelter benefit from depreciation, it continued to allow active investors, i.e. general partners, to do so.
And if an unscrupulous general partner was clever enough to trick banks to lend him most of the money for the project while putting up a nominal amount of his own money to establish the general partnership, and the banks didn’t dig too deeply or care if the general partner was overcharging for project management services, the GP could siphon off a boatload of cash from the project while legitimately reporting taxable losses for a number of years.
The real trick, though, was if the project went belly up. Then the GP would be subject to “recapture” of taxes saved from the previously claimed property depreciation. But Trump was likely able the completely mitigate the cash hit of that recapture by using a loophole that still existed at the time called a debt-equity swap on the $900 million in debt he didn’t repay the banks, which essentially turned what would have been a taxable forgiveness of debt into a tax deductible equity loss that could be used to shield the imputed taxable income from the recaptured depreciation. And he was lucky/smart regarding when he pulled that rabbit out of the hat, because that debt-equity swap loophole was closed shortly after he took advantage of it.
Hence, I FYP (in italic above).
This past Friday China sent in a new draft to a trade deal and basically deleted everything they had agreed to as concessions because “it’s not easy for them to change laws”. They basicaly spat in the USA’s face.
But the problem is Trump everyone.... it’s not China. Please.
These are not stupid people. They are betting they can wait this one out. Trumps not stupid either and even if he was his economic people around him aren’t. They going to turn up the heat. The cracks are starting to show in China’s economy and it’s def a game of chicken, a dangerous one, but it’s on now.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
Don’t confuse China holding only 4% of US Treasuries as being equal to only *currently* buying 4% of new issues, as the extant outstanding federal debt held by non-government entities is many times more than our annual current deficits.
Instead, look at the ratio of the US’ trade deficit with China to its total annual federal deficit plus rollover of existing debt, as the former reflects the pool of dollar holdings the Chinese can readily invest in new issues of US Treasuries, while the latter reflects the total annual sales of Treasuries.
The US trade deficit with China was $419 billion in 2018, while the federal budget deficit in 2019 is estimated to be about $1.3 trillion. The total outstanding federal debt is about $20 trillion, with an average maturity of probably about 10 years, meaning about $2 trillion would need to be rolled over annually over absent the need of additional borrowings. That would mean the Treasury would need to sell about $3.3 trillion in 2019 for rollover and deficit coverage.
Assuming China invests its entire US trade deficit in US treasuries, China would be expected to buy about 13% of US Treasuries in 2019. Suddenly holding those funds back from the Treasury auctions would definitely cause a spike in US Treasuries rates, spook the stock market, and likely trigger the start of recession without the Fed stepping in to replace China as a buyer in that market.
Every company or wealthy person keeps two sets of books. One is the actual income and the other is taxable income. Any idiot that believes a tax return is a real reflection of actual income by any measure is a clueless moron.
I don’t. Not anytime soon. My point was that the size of the federal deficit does not indicate the total amount of *funds the Treasury needs to raise with new issues because the annual deficit figure does not include the existing debt that is scheduled to mature that year. Ignoring rollover can dramatically understate how much the Treasury needs to raise with debt if the level of outstanding debt is high from a number of large prior annual deficits, which is surely the current case.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
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