Member
It is against you because you have no actual argument. You have ill informed opinions.Originally Posted by perman
Member
Wow, real estate investing and development sound about as easy as planting gardens - everything just grows! I wish I would have known that years ago, I'd be rich, I tell ya, rich!
But I do have a question, having known a handful of Norwegians some years ago who regaled us with reasons why they loved being in the US. Is it still illegal there to fix your own leaky faucet?
Member
I don't know what you're talking about, this sounds like something very specific, cause people fix their homes all the time. We have building codes in Norway, as I assume you do in America, maybe it has something to do with that...
As for everyone else, I also see ill-informed opinions. My challenge on Trump was very simple, and no one wanting to respond to it reflects to me exactly the same things you attribute to me, at least I specified where I was coming from instead of just insulting.
Member
Saying Trump's business isn't "doing as well as it once did" or "his capital isn't as great as it used to be" is like saying Rip's squats aren't as heavy as they used to be, so he shouldn't have any opinions on the topic of squatting.
✓ Member
Fucks sake this argument again. Only in the leftist fantasy world can everyone just park their money in the bank and earn interest in perpetuity while NOBODY takes any business risks. Where do you think the interest rates come from? People that go into business ventures often lose money, even good and wise business people. I don't even have to argue whether or not Trump actually is or is not a good and wise business man. There is NO place you can park money and earn a return on it without either investing in a business that could fail or putting it somewhere that it will be collectively invested in business or a myriad of businesses; all of which carry some form of risk.
Member
Huh? "Business risks" are 100% NOT necessary for anyone wealthy enough to live off the interest of their fortune. You just invest your money in private banking and let a team of professionals build a highly diversified, multinational portfolio. That is what rich people do. I know them. And yes, in practice that means interest in perpetuity. It may still technically mean "some form of risk," but in practice the only "risk" is between 4% and 12% annual return - no one is going broke. The only people who've gone broke are the people who invested with Madoff - and I know some of these people too.
Point being - it's not a leftist fantasy to say the Trump fortune could have just been invested instead of gambled on NY real estate.
As for the larger question re: Trump's record as a businessman, I'm not going to litigate it here because you've all already made up your minds. I will say that when it comes to the NYC business set, e.g. on Wall Street, virtually no one respects his business acumen (or intellect in general) -- he's a joke to them, but (for now) a welcome joke, because the market is up and regulations are likely to come down.
Member
The bolded part renders everything you say below it completely unbelievable. I might go so far as to question whether you understand what you said when you said "...a diversified, multinational portfolio". Somehow, in your mind, you think one can divorce himself from "business risk" by "building a diversified, multinational portfolio". Throwing around terms like "private banking" feeds the general notion that "the rich" (these people you claim to hob knob with who have "diversified, multinational portfolios" that eliminate "business risk") are plugged into some sort of perpetual, guaranteed 12% return machine that has nothing to do with the success or failure of businesses or governments for that matter. A quick search of "private banking" basically reveals it to be nothing more than preferential customer service for very high net worth customers, so I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and search instead for "private banks". Turns out these largely died in the US but there is still at least one. Nearly as I can tell, this thing runs like a hedge fund and the only thing differentiating it from public banks is that the investors can come after the assets of the bank as well as those of the owners of the bank. They certainly seem incapable of directing the spigots of national wealth in their own direction after they cock up on a grand scale like our public banks did with the bailout. Do the investors in such a bank get better investment advice and money management than the guy with the eTrade account? Yes. Do they get better investment advice than somebody like me who invests with Capital Research Management-owned mutual funds? Doubtful. Do they get better customer service than I or my eTrade using counterpart? Without a doubt. Do they enjoy perpetual positive returns absent "business" or investment risk? Absolutely not. Only federal bureaucracies and big banks enjoy such immunity.
The simple fact remains that Trump - as best can be determined - inherited a 1/5 share of his father's real estate firm, then valued at approximately $200 million. He took over and began running this business and eventually it became whatever it is today. Forbes magazine seems to provide the most consistently skeptical estimate of 3.8 - 4.0 billion dollars. Trump says ten. Had Trump liquidated his dad's business instead of running it, his share would've been around 40 million dollars. The reason we have known of Donald Trump for all these years now is not because he wrote a fairly popular book, did some real estate deals, etc. We know him for his outlandishly extravagant lifestyle - yachts, jewelry, yooge penthouses, airplanes with gold sinks, and a parade of women. The guy has undeniably spent a metric crap-ton of money on pure, unadulterated showy lifestyle. The problem then, with the statement that he "could've just put it in the bank and it'd be the same result" silliness is that it neatly ignores the fact that somehow, Trump's businesses were able support his over-the-top spending on his lifestyle while growing from 40 million bucks to 3.5 billion bucks. I'll give you a hint: this doesn't happen with "money in the bank" in the form of a 3-4% CD ladder, boys and girls.
TMPHBITEU
Excellent point.
Member
This point is legit, but a lot of that extravagance was not private spending a la Dan Blitzerian, but him getting the fruits of pageants he owned, and him having extravagant penthouses in the properties he invested in. It wasn't pure splurge. I may be giving him not enough credit, but his attempts to fraudulently get pennies by having his own charity pay for charity golf tournaments on his own golf course (and settling the subsequent law suit with charity money), having his campaign funds pay his own businesses for services, refusing to release his tax returns, all scream a man desperate to keep up a front, and are either utterly silly ways to earn some extra cash even if he already has enough, or desperate attempts to stay afloat.
I suppose we won't know until he releases his tax returns, if ever...
Member
Rich people often spend money because they are rich people. When you go to the yacht club and your buddy says "yeah so my team at Bridgewater made me a killing last year, how about you?", you don't want to say you don't have a "team", do you? I mean what kind of rich person doesn't have a team investing his money?
I also invest my money into a highly diversified, multinational portfolio. It's called an index fund. I even own multiple ones because I'm a baller.
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