this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
333 points (98.0% liked)

News

22839 readers
3718 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Sorry, my phrasing of "not how it works" is more about willingness from the lender side and not "allowed" to. He couldn't even get a bond for for the reduced amount without going through a shady company. He's certainly not going to get 4 bonds.

use two or three surety companies, each taking, let’s say, a $50 or $75 million piece to total up to $175 million.

Even with split up bonds to reduce risk in a normal situation, the bonding company is going to assess risk based on the full cost of the bond. They personally only have to put up less money, so the "how much do i lose if everything goes wrong" scenario is less, but "how likely is it something goes wrong" involves "the person on trial for lying about finances doesn't actually have enough to cover the full bond, so perhaps that increases the odds of me getting my money back"

Why would you throw away $50 million dollars. It's "less risk" only because it's less money. But if you think he's shady enough that likely you never see the money again, then why put up any money, especially if you have to compete with others to get the payout.

If someone said "You can gamble $50 million or $400 million. If you win you get 5%, but the odds of winning are only 10%, and if you lose you only get back $10 million." You would obviously opt to gamble the $50 million. You want to lose less money. The payout isn't worth it given the odds. If you were then told "oh, you can just opt out and avoid the dumpster fire of a deal", you are going to choose to opt out. No amount of "it's less risk" will make this a good deal for a bonding company.

So yes, syndicating the bond is an option, no smart bonding company is going to touch this, which means even with syndicating it will be hard for him to find enough incompetent, shady, unlicensed bonding companies.

And to be clear, this is not me arguing in favor of why any amount of money was unfair to expect Trump to acquire. This is me pointing out why he's never going to get the money from legit sources because he's a financial dumpster fire, and they should just throw the book at him instead of continuously going easy on him.

edit:

But with Donald Trump bragging that he has $500 million cash in the bank, combined with the other assets we know he has in real estate

Trump bragging about made up numbers don't make anyone more confident about his assets. Both the value of his assets and how much stake in those assets is actually his is a thing he notoriously lies about. He's even been found guilty about lying about his finances I think.

If he actually had that money money just in the bank, none of this would be an issue, but the thing is... it's not true.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

okay yes I was thrown by the phrasing, thanks for expanding on things, great points!