Posted on 05/07/2019 4:12:43 PM PDT by luv2ski
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.
Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.
The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
let me see! Last two years of really building this country back up or 30 year old tax returns? hmmmmm
I don’t care. Thanks for the past two years and I look forward to many many more.
Is it possible to repeal the 22nd Amendment only temporarily so DJT could do 3 terms and then immediately reinstate
The IRS is infested with Rats. I saw more then a few pics of IRS staff who had Obongo stickers on their monitors. I have been expecting leaks. I’m guessing the tax returns the Rats are crying about actually make Trump look good or they would have shown up in the NYT already.
-In 2014 he lost $444 million on his Tesco (a UK Supermarket chain) deal
-He lost $3.5 billion on the Dexter Shoe deal
-He lost $875 million on Energy Futures Holdings
-$800 million in losses on his purchase of General Reinsurance company
Didn’t Hillary just call on “China”to do this very thing?
I failed in a business... it didn’t kill me, and I emerged stronger.
30 year tax returns, in the years following the worst stock market crash in history. Ridiculous.
Real estate in particular is tricky - it is not like making widgets where you can scale to meet demand, close-out excess inventory, drive efficiencies through volume sales and purchases and production output. The up/down cycles in the RE business extend out for years... years of value appreciation, and then years of depreciation. When building from scratch or renovating a property, there are great expenses and a lot of time; and if the timing goes against you by the time the project is finished you may not be able to realize a profit for years, if at all. If you're lucky you can generate enough cash flow to make interest payments.
Here is one great example. Around 2006 Deutch Bank put up nearly $800 million in loans to finance a condominium project on the Las Vegas Strip. The towers went up just in time for the 2008 Real Estate crash. Prices plummeted and there was no way the developer would be able to sell the condos and make a profit on the development. The developer defaulted, Deutch Bank took possession of the property and spent another $4 billion to turn it from condos into a hotel/casino that became The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas.
DB eventually sold the hotel for $1.7 billion - a total $3.1 billion loss for one single property. Trump is not as wealthy as Warren Buffett, and doesn't have the same access to capital as an international investment bank. As wealthy as he is, one bad deal like that would give a developer the size of Trump net operating loss carryovers for many, many years. He could make $300 million a year in profit for the next decade and never pay a dime in taxes because of that one loss. And we already know by the portion of his tax return that was illegally leaked to the press, he had at least one sour deal that did in fact give him something like $900 million in loss carryovers.
This is as compelling as the NYT revealing secret tapes of a bear pooping and eating in the woods for the last ten years. He had turbulent times and got into some bad investments where he ran up serious losses. Then he legally did what any other investor in a similar situation would do—he legally wrote off those losses against other gains and, thus, ended up paying no Federal Income Tax for a number of years. Like, duh, big deal; it’s the same thing many of us, myself included, have legally done and will continue to do. If he hadn’t done it, he’d have bee a total nitwit.
Releasing private tax information is a serious crime. Someone should go to jail for both leaking it to the NYT and for the NYT publishing it.
Thank you for your post on Warren Buffet regrets. Bump for reference
Do you have any Idea how much of a failure Abraham Lincoln was for 30 years?
Multiple Failed businesses that NEVER turned profitable, lost EVERY election and won because power that be wanted someone else to be holding the bag of the war they engineered which slaughtered more Americans in war than all the other wars combined TO THIS DAY.
I want to be clear I didn’t post this b/c I was concerned about failed business deals. I posted it b/c I am furious that a private citizen would have extremely private information made public without their permission. I could care less about his business deals. He is the best President since Reagan.
1985-94? Might as well be 1885-94.
Did he come up with any schemes to steer Hundreds of Millions of TAXPAYER Dollars and Government Contracts to His Family Business?? Fineswine, Piglosi??
Who gives a crap
Ok. Then he doesn’t have to release them
Sounds like great experience preparing Trump for running a country in 22 trillion dollars in debt.
The Left...ALL of them, are VILE, EVIL, VICIOUS LYING DESTROYERS of good people!
You noticed that too, huh? As the ladies say, #GameOver
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