I'm loving the eye-roll from somebody who probably doesn't understand the first thing about finance.
It's not just one way of looking at it. It's the right way. Bankruptcies tell you nothing in and of themselves. You have to look at why the bankruptcies happen.
It's not a question of stiffing the banks. It's a question of contractual duties versus fiduciary ones. You have no fiduciary duties to your lenders. Only contractual ones. His projects are charged very high interest, by the way, because his projects are risky (as most real estate developments are). If you charge 10% over the risk free rate, and 10% of the projects go bankrupt, and you get 50 cents on the dollar recovery on those that do go bankrupt, you're still making money as a lender, on average. In fact, you're doing great since the bankrupt properties might have paid several years of interest and paid down some principal before they went bankrupt. And the ones that did well became nice little annuities, with the prospect of ancillary lending business as well. You make it sound like the Trump took advantage of his lenders. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. I don't know actually. But it's likely that it was a symbiotic relationship, and both sides made money on average and over the long run.
The jury is still out on Trump University, literally. Was it a scam of some sort? Probably. So is Harvard University, by the way.
I disagree. That is exactly the kind of person I want. Our Presidents have been too cautious. We need somebody to shake up the system a bit.
